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Diagnosing migraine from genome-wide genotype data: a machine learning analysis

Danelakis A, Kumelj T, Winsvold BS, Bjørk MH, Nachev P, Matharu M, Giles D, Tronvik E et al.

Brain : a journal of neurology, 2026

43 participants

Abstract

Migraine has an assumed polygenic basis, but the genetic risk variants identified in genome-wide association studies only explain a proportion of the heritability. We aimed to develop machine learning models, capturing non-additive and interactive effects, to address the missing heritability. This was a cross-sectional population-based study of participants in the second and third Trøndelag Health Study. Individuals underwent genome-wide genotyping and were phenotyped based on validated modified criteria of the International Classification of Headache Disorders. Four datasets of increasing numbers of genetic variants were created using different thresholds of linkage disequilibrium and univariate genome-wide associated P-values. A series of machine learning and deep learning methods were optimized and evaluated. The genotype tools PLINK and LDPred2 were used for polygenic risk scoring. Models were trained on a partition of the dataset and tested in a hold-out set. The area under the receiver operating characteristics curve was used as the primary scoring metric. Classification by machine learning was statistically compared to that of polygenic risk scoring. Finally, we explored the biological functions of the variants unique to the machine learning approach. Overall, 43 197 individuals (51% women), with a mean age of 54.6 years, were included in the modelling. A light gradient boosting machine performed best for the three smallest datasets (108, 7771 and 7840 variants), all…

How strong is the evidence?

Evidence Hub reads this as a cross-sectional, done in people. Its evidence level is 4 of 5 (Low · observational). Observational designs can show an association but not prove cause. Reported size: 43 participants or records.

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