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Scientific Commentary |
Establishing the genetic heterogeneity of familial hemiplegic migraine
1 Section on Developmental Genetic Epidemiology, National Institute of Mental Health Bethesda, MD, USA 2 Molecular Genetics Unit, National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health Bethesda, MD, USA
E-mail: lown@mail.nih.gov and singleta@mail.nih.gov
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In this issue of Brain Thomsen and colleagues present data representing several important developments in the field of familial hemiplegic migraine (FHM) with their investigation of the genetic spectrum and prevalence of this disorder (Thomsen et al., 2006
). The authors have performed the first population-based sampling strategy to obtain complete case ascertainment of this rare disease (Lykke Thomsen et al., 2002) and followed this initial effort with a complete molecular genetic analysis of the collected samples, both by searching for mutation at the three identified FHM loci (Ophoff et al., 1996; De Fusco et al., 2003; Dichgans et al., 2005) and also by performing a genome wide linkage scan. These