For decades, migraine has largely been diagnosed the old-fashioned way: doctors ask patients what their headaches feel like.
There is no blood test, scan or other established biomarker that can definitively identify the disorder. Instead, clinicians rely on a familiar constellation of symptoms — intense headaches, often accompanied by nausea and sensitivity to light or sound.
But new research suggests that migraine may leave a much broader biological footprint than those symptoms reveal.
Researchers in Norway have used machine learning to identify people with migraine from information that did not include their headache symptoms — and then used artificial intelligence to tease out distinct groups of migraine patients.
The findings, published in the journal Neurology, raise the possibility that migraine is not a single disorder at all, but “a spectrum disorder that can be identified and stratified using broad clinical and biological data—not solely through headache-specific symptoms,” researchers wrote.
