"The pain in your head, it's so painful. It's almost hard to describe.
I have always said to people, don't ever let me own a gun
because I think I would probably shoot myself
in the head to stop the pain."
It’s hard to imagine such extreme pain unless you’ve
experienced it but migraine is one of the leading
causes of disability in the world.
"A large proportion of the population suffer from it and
if a medium migraine attack is lasting a full day,
that's a lot of disability across a lifetime."
Around one in five Australians suffer from migraine,
which can cause:
Attacks can last for several hours or days,
which not only causes chronic health and lifestyle
problems but also has a huge cost to society.
"The economic cost in Australia is enormous.
It's estimated to be a little over $35 billion."
That includes:
49-year old Beth Murphy has been a migraine sufferer
for more than 30 years.
She’s experienced migraine attacks once or twice
a week since she was 16.
"The head in a vice, that sort of crushing feeling in your skull.
That's probably the worst part.
Sometimes it feels like a whole burning sensation
around your head."
Beth has tried medication, alternative therapies and diets
cutting out coffee and chocolate but nothing has worked.
Desperate for help, she joined Professor Lyn Griffith’s
migraine trial at Queensland University of Technology.
"When I was doing the study, I definitely felt better.
I did get less migraines during that period."
The trial is ongoing, so at this point Beth doesn’t know
what medication she was given but some patients received
medication to lower blood pressure and cholesterol
and others received placebos.
"If you know what genes play a role in a particular disorder,
then you can start to get clues about the sorts of
treatments that you can develop for those people.
And so looking at the information we've been able to
get from genes, we've been able to identify different ways
we might like to develop new treatments."
Professor Griffiths says migraine can be inherited and
three generations of her immediate family
all suffer from the disorder.
"My mother got it very badly when I was a teenager.
I also started getting it when I was a teenager,
that continued through to my 20s, 30s, et cetera
and here was my son getting it at a much younger age.
At four he was having the nausea, the vomiting,
sore head and also these strange visual disturbances."
There are also many different types of migraine and triggers.
"Triggers might be things like bright lights,
it might be barometric pressure changes.
It might be strong smells, such as strong perfumes.
It can even be certain types of food like caffeine
or chocolate or red wine."
Professor Dale Nyholt is a genetics expert and he’s analysing
the data from Professor Griffith’s migraine genetic studies.
He’s also working on the world’s largest migraine study
involving more than 100,000 patients across 12 research centres.
"We're just finalising results and now we're finding almost
100 genetic risk factors for migraine."
A severe neurological condition, migraine is difficult for
scientists to monitor because attacks happen in episodes.
There’s also no cure and treatment options are limited,
so international scientific collaboration is crucial to learning more
about this debilitating illness.
"We need clinicians, we need geneticists, we need people
in the wet lab, we need statistical analysis.
We also need to look at other things such as biological pathways.
So it requires a huge amount of collaboration across
different areas of science."
And with almost a billion people around the world
like Beth desperate for pain relief, scientists are doing
everything they can to find solutions.
"I would definitely hope for a cure for migraine so that
people don't have live like this and so I myself don't have to."
"I've spent over 20 years studying migraine headaches and
I hope to be studying it for the rest of my life because
there's just many more things for us to learn about it
and if I can help those sufferers to live life without
migraine headaches, then I think that that would be
a life well worth lived."