A Genetic Link Between Migraines and Depression?

If you had headaches that were so bad they made you nauseous, landed you in bed and sometimes lasted for days, you'd have a right to be depressed. Indeed, that has long been the reasoning behind the high depression rate among people with migraines — 46%, about four times higher than the rate in the overall population. The cause and effect — bad headaches lead to bad mood — seems obvious.

Now, however, a study in the journal Neurology suggests a more basic connection: genes. "Most people think that migraine patients are depressed because they have headaches," says the study's co-author, Dr. Gisela Terwindt, a neurologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. "We found that there is a genetic predisposition by people with migraines to be depressed."

Read the full article at time.com