Skip to content

MAGMA GTEx

Tissue Enrichment

MAGMA1 was applied to the UK BioBank GWAS of migraine23 using bulk RNAseq data from GTEx4 as a reference. The gene-property analysis results are plotted below.

The four significant tissues in this analysis were all digestive tissues. This result is consistent with another migraine GWAS which also used the UK BioBank (but also included other individuals), and where the top MAGMA tissues were also all digestive tissues.5

The finding of significant digestive tissues is somewhat surprising, as migraine is generally considered a neurological disease6. This MAGMA finding may relate to studies reporting that irritable bowel syndrome is found with increased prevalence in those with migraine.78

A different migraine GWAS in a USA cohort found MAGMA enrichment primarily in brain tissues, but also in the uterus.9

  1. Christiaan A De Leeuw, Joris M Mooij, Tom Heskes, and Danielle Posthuma. MAGMA: generalized gene-set analysis of GWAS data. PLoS Computational Biology, 11(4):e1004219, 2015. URL: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004219. ↩

  2. UK Biobank Whole-Genome Sequencing Consortium and others. Whole-genome sequencing of 490,640 UK Biobank participants. Nature, 645(8081):692, 2025. URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09272-9. ↩

  3. GWAS Catalog - Study: GCST90473326. [Accessed 25-05-2026]. URL: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/gwas/studies/GCST90473326. ↩

  4. GTEx Consortium. The GTEx consortium atlas of genetic regulatory effects across human tissues. Science, 369(6509):1318–1330, 2020. URL: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aaz1776. ↩

  5. Hélène Choquet, Jie Yin, Alice S Jacobson, Brandon H Horton, Thomas J Hoffmann, Eric Jorgenson, Andrew L Avins, and Alice R Pressman. New and sex-specific migraine susceptibility loci identified from a multiethnic genome-wide meta-analysis. Communications Biology, 4(1):864, 2021. URL: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8298472/. ↩

  6. Marco A Pescador Ruschel and Orlando De Jesus. Migraine headache. In StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing, 2024. URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK560787/. ↩

  7. Wasit Wongtrakul, Nipith Charoenngam, and Patompong Ungprasert. Increased prevalence of irritable bowel syndrome in migraine patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis. European journal of gastroenterology & hepatology, 34(1):56–63, 2022. URL: https://journals.lww.com/eurojgh/Abstract/2022/01000/Increased_prevalence_of_irritable_bowel_syndrome.9.aspx. ↩

  8. Tatvan S Todor and Shin Fukudo. Systematic review and meta-analysis of calculating degree of comorbidity of irritable bowel syndrome with migraine. BioPsychoSocial Medicine, 17(1):22, 2023. URL: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10251688/. ↩

  9. Marianna Gasperi, Sara Brin Rosenthal, Adam X Maihofer, Armand Gerstenberger, Daniel Dochtermann, Hélène Choquet, Alice Pressman, Matthew S Panizzon, Murray B Stein, Nathaniel M Schuster, and others. A multi-ancestry meta genome-wide association study of migraine among veterans: associations with traumatic brain injury, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Molecular Psychiatry, pages 1–15, 2025. URL: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12863721/. ↩