Reza Mirfakhraie, Khosro Jamebozorgi, Mahtab Ramezani, Farhad Assarzadegan, Omid Hesami, Marjan Asadollahi and Behnam Safarpour Lima
Background: Migraine affects about 16% of the worldwide population. The pathogenesis of the disease consists of a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Given that, according to different polymorphism studies, ethnicity has a role in the gene diversity of migraine, this study was designed to determine the role of MTHFR C677T gene polymorphism in people from Tehran, Iran, who suffer from migraine headaches.
Materials and methods: In this case control study, we determined the prevalence of common MTHFR C677T polymorphism in 132 migraine patients in line with IHS criteria (37 migraine patients with aura and 95 migraine patients without aura) and compared it to that in 142 matched healthy controls. The correlation between migraine and genotype was investigated using the chi-square test. The Bonferroni adjusted P-value was also used for pairwise comparison.
Results: Our findings demonstrated that there was no significant difference in the frequencies of the TT genotype or T allele distributions between the migraine patients with aura and the control subjects. On the other hand, the frequency of the TT genotype among migraine patients without aura was significantly lower than those in the control group or the patients with aura group.
Conclusion: MTHFR C677T polymorphism, which is responsible for reducing MTHFR activity in the folate metabolism, is not a major genetic susceptibility factor for migraine in the investigated population.
