# Blood Brain Barrier and Migraine: Effect on Therapy (Diversity Supplement)

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA · 2021 · $32,304

## Abstract

Project Summary
Migraine is a primary headache disorder that affects women at a 3:1 ratio as compared to men which features a
cyclical pattern of chronic pain attacks resulting from central sensitization of the trigeminal nervous system and
various other neurovascular mechanisms to create a disease state wherein pain perception is intensely heightened.
Migraine headaches are often triggered by environmental sensory stimuli, such as light and sound, wherein banal
amounts of sensory input become noxious and induce headache suggesting that maladaptive association
between the nociceptive and sensory processing networks could be the underlying cause. Neural damage leading
to altered functional connectivity, increased production of inflammatory neuropeptides; and dysfunctional
integration and processing of modality-specific sensory information are thought to be some mechanisms of
migraine. Each of these is also implicated disruption of blood brain barrier homeostasis. Decreased integrity of
the BBB can either increase or decrease the amount of xenobiotics entering the brain during disease providing
a rational to study how therapeutic efficacy varies between the sexes during migraine. This proposal will
determine if antimigraine blood to brain uptake differs between male and females because of physiological
differences in the blood brain barrier by testing the hypothesis that sex hormone regulation of NHE1 through
ERbeta in brain endothelial cells regulates sumatriptan blood-to-brain uptake in a sex dependent manner.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10404773
- **Project number:** 3R01NS099292-05S1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
- **Principal Investigator:** Tally Marie Milnes
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $32,304
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2017-09-29 → 2023-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10404773

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10404773, Blood Brain Barrier and Migraine: Effect on Therapy (Diversity Supplement) (3R01NS099292-05S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10404773. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*