Abstract

Background
and Objectives: Migraine is a benign and recurring syndrome of headache, nausea, vomi- ting, or other symptoms of neurologic dysfunction in varying admixtures; also migraine is as common neurological disorder as prevalence of patients is 9.7% of the female and 3.2% of the male in Korean population. However, the pathogenesis of migraine is still largely unknown. Migraine has a strong(up to 50%) genetic component, which is higher in migraine with aura: MA than migraine without aura: MO, with a probable multifactorial polygenic inheritance. Tumor necrosis factors(TNF: TNFA and TNFB) are major pro-inflammatory cytokines that are thought to be significant in the pathogenesis of migraine. Thus, we scrutinized an association of TNFA and TNFB gene with the risk of migraine. TNF-308 and LTA+252 polymorphisms have been previously reported to be associated with migraine patients without aura in Caucasian population. Such findings are not extensively studied in Asian population including Koreans. Method: We investigated the genetic association study of polymorphisms in the diverse SNPs of tumor necrosis factor(TNF) as well as the promoter region of the TNFA gene and the first intron region of the TNFB gene. 410 female patients with migraine and 383 healthy controls were genotyped with massarray, snapshot and direct sequencing. Results: Significant difference of allele frequency was observed between SNP that located in the pro- moter region of LTA gene and MA patients, but allele frequency of MO patients was significantly diffe- rent from those of the control. Conclusions: These findings suggest that the LTA gene influence susceptibility of migraine with aura, but TNFA gene doesn't influence two most clinical subtype of migraine. Korean Journal of Headache 5(1):105-105, 2004