Discussion
We leveraged genetic methods to investigate comorbidity and causality between migraine and sleep disturbances. We found evidence for shared genetic influences between multiple sleep traits and migraine, as well as potential causal effects of insomnia symptoms and difficulty awakening on migraine. These effects were robust in sensitivity analyses for horizontal pleiotropy and there was no evidence for strong effects in the reverse direction.
We found evidence f shared genetic influences between several sleep traits and migraine, with the strongest genetic correlation found with insomnia symptoms (rg = 0.29). With the exception of a previously reported genetic correlation of migraine with MDD of 0.32, the magnitude of genetic overlap between insomnia and migraine was greater than that reported for most other common disease traits in the UK Biobank
18
and in previous studies,
16
,
31
,
32
suggesting more shared underlying biology between migraine and insomnia than migraine and other cardiometabolic, neuropsychiatric and immune phenotypes. Weaker but highly significant correlations of migraine were seen with other sleep duration and quality traits, confirming that the highly pleiotropic migraine genetic loci also influence sleep traits. As the sample size for migraine GWAS grows, future cross‐phenotype analyses may identify specific loci underlying these genetic correlations. Although prior work has demonstrated that rare mutations in the casein kinase (CK Iδ) gene may simultaneously cause familial migraine and advanced sleep phase syndrome,
33
our work showed no evidence for an overall shared genetic basis for migraine and morning diurnal preference. This suggests that genetic variation in circadian rhythms may not generally have an important effect on migraine etiology, but certain circadian genes (e.g., CK Iδ) may have pleiotropic roles in migraine via pathways unrelated to their circadian effects.
33
Mendelian randomization analyses suggested a causal effect of insomnia symptoms on migraine, adding support to findings from prospective epidemiologic studies.
7
This estimate was consistent across sensitivity analyses, and was stronger in a secondary analysis using a larger number of insomnia SNPs from a meta‐analysis of UK Biobank and 23andMe. These variants were only used in sensitivity analyses because sample overlap of the insomnia symptoms GWAS (288,557 insomnia cases and 655,920 controls from 23andMe)
24
with the migraine GWAS (30,465 migraine cases and 143,147 controls from 23andMe)
8
may bias effect estimates away from the null. However, this bias is unlikely to be large given that the degree of case overlap is not large (up to 30,465 migraine GWAS cases included in the insomnia GWAS of n = 1,331,010; 3%) and that the genetic instrument for insomnia is strong ( F‐ statistic > 10).
34
Given the nominal statistical evidence for this finding, additional replication in independent samples with well‐defined and validated diagnostic criteria for insomnia will strengthen confidence in this effect. Nevertheless, the evidence from this study supports findings from longitudinal epidemiologic studies of insomnia and migraine (reviewed by Uhlig et al.).
7
One of the largest studies to date (26,197 participants from the HUNT study) reported that individuals with insomnia at baseline had a relative risk of 1.40 (95% CI 1.0–1.9; P = 0.02) for migraine after 11 years of follow up.
35
Our results are also consistent with evidence from a clinical trial of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia in patients with migraine, in which treatment of insomnia reduced migraine frequency.
36
Although insomnia symptoms are genetically correlated with short sleep duration,
9
,
12
there was no significant effect of genetically proxied self‐reported short sleep duration on migraine. This is in contrast to prior MR analyses which found concordant effects of insomnia and short sleep duration on coronary artery disease risk,
9
,
37
suggesting that the short sleep component of insomnia may be less relevant to the etiology of migraine. Rather, other features of insomnia such as hyperarousal may play more prominent roles in the etiology of migraine.
38
Relative to insomnia, less is known about the phenomenon of difficulty awakening, which in some settings is referred to as sleep inertia.
39
,
40
Difficulty awakening is inversely genetically correlated
24
with morning diurnal preference (rg = −0.78) and with insomnia symptoms (rg = 0.23) and may therefore reflect a combination of circadian misalignment and interrupted sleep.
24
,
39
However, we did not find evidence for a causal effect of morning diurnal preference on migraine. This suggests that the effect of difficulty awakening on migraine may be driven by disturbances to sleep quality rather than through circadian mechanisms. Difficulty awakening
40
may also be a consequence of psychiatric comorbidities, and prior work has highlighted genetic correlations between sleep and psychiatric comorbidities,
9
,
12
and between migraine and psychiatric disease.
31
This motivated multivariable MR analyses adjusting MR estimates for potential pleiotropy with MDD and with anxious symptoms. We found partial attenuation of the MR estimates for both difficulty awakening and insomnia symptoms on migraine when adjusting for MDD, however the adjusted MR estimate remained significant. This finding is consistent with prior epidemiologic analyses that have shown that sleep disturbances influence migraine risk independently of MDD and anxiety.
41
This suggests that sleep disturbances directly influence migraine risk independently of psychiatric comorbidities and therefore warrant intervention in their own right.
There was minimal evidence for an effect of migraine on any of the sleep patterns or disturbances. While longitudinal epidemiologic studies lasting up to 11 years have suggested potential effects of migraine on insomnia risk,
7
,
35
our results are in line with microlongitudinal studies that have not shown effects of migraine headaches on next‐day sleep.
42
We did, however, identify a small effect of migraine liability on increased napping frequency. The use of naps as an acute abortive treatment for migraine
2
may be one possible mechanism mediating this effect. The generally null effects of migraine on habitual sleep patterns do not exclude an acute effect of a migraine episode on sleep. An analogy may be drawn to the relationship of caffeine with sleep, where MR analyses have not shown causal effects of caffeine on sleep patterns,
43
suggesting discordance between effects of short and long‐term caffeine consumption. Similarly, while a migraine headache may acutely interrupt sleep, we did not find strong evidence for effects of migraine liability on sustained sleep patterns.
There are several potential pathways by which sleep quality or insomnia symptoms may influence migraine susceptibility. Cortical excitability, a potential mechanism of migraine pathophysiology,
44
may be increased by insomnia.
45
Sleep disturbances
2
,
46
may also reduce pain thresholds
47
and cause dysfunction of the glymphatic system, resulting in accumulation of nociceptive CNS waste.
4
,
41
Finally, difficulty awakening may reflect slow clearance of CNS adenosine,
39
with the consequent increases in adenosine increasing the likelihood of headache onset.
48
Additional work is necessary to determine which of these pathways, if any, are relevant to the effect of sleep disturbances on migraine.
We acknowledge limitations to this work. First, although we incorporated sensitivity analyses for horizontal pleiotropy, we cannot fully exclude the influence of this potential bias. Second, MR power calculators are not currently designed for ordinal or binary exposures, so we focused on interpretation of the confidence intervals to determine whether the bounds contained clinically relevant effects. Third, single, self‐reported questions are less reliable for phenotyping than validated scales or physician‐diagnosed insomnia, which were unavailable in UKB. Fourth, the known common variant contributions to migraine primarily reflect the genetic architecture of migraine without aura (MO), which is the most prevalent form of migraine.
8
Our findings may therefore have greater relevance to the pain component of migraine, which is more prominent in MO.
49
This limitation may be addressed in future analyses as genetic data on migraine with aura become more robust. Finally, the selection of relatively healthy individuals into UKB may limit generalizability to less healthy populations and to populations of non‐European ancestry.
International
1 School of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Health, and Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. 2 Department of Epidemiology and Cancer Control, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee 38105, USA. 3 23andMe, Inc., 899 W. Evelyn Avenue, Mountain View, California 94041, USA. 4 School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, University of Central Lancashire, Preston PR1 2HE, United Kingdom. 5 Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Niigata University Graduate School of Medical and Dental Sciences, Niigata 950‐2181, Japan. 6 Department of Biomedicine ‐ Human Genetics, Aarhus University, DK‐8000 Aarhus, Denmark. 7 iPSYCH, The Lundbeck Foundation Initiative for Integrative Psychiatric Research, DK‐2100 Copenhagen, Denmark. 8 Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia. 9 Divisions of Preventive Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. 10 deCODE Genetics/Amgen, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland. 11 Department of Biostatistics, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3GL, UK. 12 Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7BN, UK. 13 KULeuven, Department of Development and Regeneration, Organ systems, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. 14 Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Leuven University Fertility Centre, University Hospital Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. 15 Harvard T.H. 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