Heart and Brain Connection to Migraines Draws First-Ever Co-Funded Research Awards

DALLAS, TX and WILMINGTON, DE — For the first time in their institutional histories, the American Heart Association and the American Headache Society are joining forces to fund scientific research into one of the most stubborn mysteries in neurology and cardiology: how migraine and other headache disorders shape the long-term health of the heart and the blood vessels of the brain. The two organizations announced a first-ever co-funded Innovative Project Award on September 22, 2026, along with three additional awards financed solely by the Heart Association, all aimed at unraveling the biological ties between headache disorders and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease. The collaboration signals a growing recognition among funders that migraine is not merely a debilitating neurological condition but may also be a window into vascular risk that spans a lifetime.

The Innovative Project Award provides $200,000 over two years and is deliberately designed to back high-risk, high-reward science. Eligible projects spanned the full breadth of biomedical inquiry, from basic laboratory studies of cells and molecules to clinical investigations and population health research, and applicants could propose work across the entire human lifespan, from children and adolescents through middle age and late life. The prioritization of innovation over incremental safety reflects a conscious strategy by both societies: rather than extending established research programs, they wanted to seed ideas that conventional funding mechanisms might consider too speculative, but that could open entirely new avenues for preventing stroke and heart disease in people living with chronic headache disorders.

This year’s co-funded award goes to Juliana Navia Pelaez, Ph.D., an assistant professor at St. Louis University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, for a project titled “Neurogenic Priming of Perivascular Macrophages by Migraine-Associated Peptides Increases Stroke Risk.” Her work targets a question that has long puzzled clinicians: why some people who suffer from migraine face a higher risk of stroke. Researchers have traditionally concentrated on the blood vessels themselves, since during a migraine attack these vessels may tighten, swell, or alter the way blood moves through them. But attention is now shifting toward another, less obvious player — the brain’s own resident immune cells, which stand guard along the vessels and help protect neural tissue from injury.

Pelaez’s central hypothesis is that repeated migraine attacks may push these vascular immune cells into a state of chronic overactivation. “If migraines happen over and over, these immune cells might stay ‘on’ for too long. When this happens, they might accidentally make the blood vessels weaker,” Pelaez said. “If the vessels get weaker, the brain might have a harder time protecting itself from a stroke.” In practical terms, the project will map which signals released during a migraine activate these brain immune cells, and then compare how the cells respond to a subsequent stroke in animals that have experienced migraine-like events versus those that have not. The comparison is designed to isolate the specific contribution of migraine biology to stroke vulnerability, rather than attributing everything to shared risk factors such as hypertension or smoking.

The translational implications could be considerable. “If our idea is right,” Pelaez added, “this could help scientists find new ways to prevent strokes in people with chronic migraine, maybe by calming these overactive brain cells or blocking the signals that bother them.” Such a strategy would represent a fundamentally different approach to stroke prevention in this population. Instead of managing vascular risk factors after the fact, clinicians might one day intervene directly on the neuroimmune signaling cascade that links repeated migraine attacks to cumulative vessel damage — a possibility that could reshape how neurologists and cardiologists jointly manage patients with frequent or chronic migraine.

The Heart Association’s three additional awards extend the same investigative ambition across distinct mechanistic frontiers. The first goes to Andrea M. Harriott, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor in neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, for a study titled “The Impact Of Cortical Spreading Depolarizations On Endothelial Phenotype, Neovascularization, and Collateral Remodeling.” Migraine with aura has long been epidemiologically linked to stroke and heart attack, and earlier thinking held that this association might simply reflect an elevated burden of conventional risk factors among people with aura. Harriott’s project will test a more direct possibility: that the long-term exposure to the mechanisms underlying migraine aura — cortical spreading depolarizations, waves of altered electrical and metabolic activity that sweep across the brain — causes lasting structural and functional harm to cerebral blood vessels. Her team will examine protein-level changes in the cells lining vessel walls, the formation of new blood vessels, and the remodeling of collateral circulation that the brain relies on when its primary supply routes are compromised.

The second award supports Matthew T. Bender, M.D., an associate professor at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, whose project, “Defining The Glymphatic-Hemodynamic Axis In IIH: A Novel Multi-Scale Quantitative MRI Framework,” addresses idiopathic intracranial hypertension, or IIH. This headache disorder disproportionately affects overweight women of childbearing age, and clinicians believe it arises from elevated pressure inside the skull driven by excess cerebrospinal fluid. Recent evidence, however, suggests the disorder may also involve dysfunction of the brain’s waste clearance network, known as the glymphatic system. Bender’s team will develop a new magnetic resonance imaging framework capable of visualizing both the glymphatic system and cerebral blood flow without contrast dye or invasive procedures. By scanning IIH patients before and after venous stenting — a procedure that opens narrowed veins draining the brain — the researchers hope to determine how restoring venous outflow affects waste clearance and hemodynamics, potentially establishing imaging markers that could guide treatment decisions.

The third award funds Neil Dani, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, for “Illuminating Nociceptive And Analgesic Mechanisms Of Choroid Plexus In Migraine And Obesity Models.” Dani’s work responds to the rising prevalence of obesity-related migraine, a clinically important overlap given that both conditions share inflammatory signaling pathways. His focus is the choroid plexus, a small structure inside the brain’s ventricles that produces cerebrospinal fluid and acts as a highly regulated interface, or gate, between the body and the central nervous system. The working hypothesis is that inflammatory signals generated in the body during obesity may travel through the cerebrospinal fluid via the choroid plexus, sensitizing pain circuits and increasing migraine frequency or severity. The project will characterize inflammation patterns in this structure, identify cellular rewiring and immune signaling changes associated with obesity and migraine, and test whether clinically approved drugs — including acetazolamide, a long-standing medication already used in related contexts — can reduce both swelling and pain signaling in experimental models.

Taken together, the four projects sketch a research landscape in which headache disorders and vascular medicine are no longer treated as separate silos. Each award interrogates a different node of the heart-brain axis: immune cells that patrol cerebral vessels, the electrical storms of migraine aura and their vascular aftermath, the interplay of intracranial pressure and brain waste clearance, and the inflammatory crosstalk between metabolism, body-wide immune signaling, and pain. The funders emphasize that these efforts demonstrate the shared commitment of the American Headache Society and the American Heart Association to advancing brain health research, and the co-funding structure itself may prove as influential as the science it supports, encouraging cross-disciplinary training, shared patient cohorts, and unified endpoints across neurology and cardiology.

The initiative also sits within a far larger funding tradition. Supporting scientific research and discovery through programs of this kind is a cornerstone of the century-old American Heart Association’s lifesaving mission. Since 1949, the Association has invested more than $6.3 billion in cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, and brain health research, making it the single largest non-profit, non-governmental supporter of heart and brain health research in the United States. Officials note that knowledge generated through this funding continues to save lives and directly affect millions of people across the country and around the world. For the millions who live with migraine and other headache disorders — and for the clinicians who care for them — the new awards offer something more immediate than long-term promise: a concrete, funded research agenda that treats the pounding in the head and the health of the heart and brain’s vessels as inseparable parts of the same biological story.

Subject of Research: Funded research projects investigating the links between migraine, headache disorders, and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular health

Article Title: New scientific research projects study heart/brain connection to migraines, headaches

Article References: New scientific research projects study heart/brain connection to migraines, headaches. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: migraine, stroke, American Heart Association, American Headache Society, cerebrovascular health, cortical spreading depolarization, idiopathic intracranial hypertension, glymphatic system, choroid plexus, perivascular macrophages, obesity-related migraine, research funding