Drinking coffee may help prevent migraine headaches

Coffee intake appears to have a causal relationship with migraine, as shown by the results of a Mendelian randomization (MR) study. This finding suggests that drinking coffee will either trigger or prevent migraine.

This MR study explored the causal association of coffee intake with the risk of neurological disease, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, stroke, and migraine.

Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) achieving genetical statistical significance with coffee intake were used as instrumental variable (IV). The researchers stretched the genetic instruments from the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unity analysis on the UK Biobank.

MR analyses, the main approach, were performed using the inverse variance weighted (IVW) method. The researchers also conducted sensitivity analyses using MR-Egger and MR-PRESSO to evaluate the strength of the findings.

MR analysis revealed 40 SNPs as IV, and the F statistics for all SNPs ranged from 16 to 359. The IVW method yielded genetic evidence pointing to a potential causal relationship between coffee consumption and a lower risk of migraine (odds ratio [OR], 0.528, 95 percent confidence interval [CI], 0.342‒0.817; p=0.004) and migraine with aura (OR, 0.374, 95 percent CI, 0.208‒0.672; p=0.001).

In contrast, no significant association was noted between coffee intake and other neurological diseases along with their subtypes.