Migraine

One of the foundations of migraine treatment is the identification and avoidance of migraine triggers ― the individual-specific factors that initiate migraine attacks.  Paradoxically, there is no test for migraine triggers, and it is virtually impossible to identify a patient’s migraine triggers using available techniques.  This undermines and significantly complicates patient care.

Identifying individual-specific migraine triggers is difficult because the triggers are complicated.  Instead of a simple cause-and-effect relationship (such as, drink a cup of coffee at breakfast and have a migraine in the afternoon), groups of migraine triggers interact over days.  For example, suppose you ate a particular food three days ago, a low-pressure weather system passed through last night, you had a stressful morning, and you experienced a migraine in the afternoon.  Given the millions of potential combinations, finding the individual-specific factors was not possible — until now.

In a clinical trial at one of the leading headache institutes in the country, TSI successfully identified migraine triggers for the first time (including known and, to TSI’s knowledge, previously unreported migraine triggers), thereby solving this difficult problem and fulfilling a long-standing need in the existing practice of medicine.  By avoiding their migraine triggers, patients can significantly reduce the frequency, severity and duration of their headaches, and get their lives back.  Moreover, the dataset associated with this service will allow existing therapies to be targeted to specific patients, which will allow physicians to provide patients with more precise and effective therapies.

By identifying individual-specific migraine triggers, TSI’s service can also help physicians change the practice of medicine.  For example, through aggressive diagnosis and treatment, the pattern of migraine can be disrupted early in life, thereby preventing children and adolescents with migraine from becoming adults with chronic headaches.