Can You Change Your Genetic Expression? What Epigenetics Means for Migraine
By Dr. Brenna Erickson, DC ┃ The Migraine Whisperer 📖 Reading Time: 8 minutes
The Myth: "My Mom Has It, So I'm Stuck With It"
If migraine runs in your family, there's a good chance you've decided your fate was set before you were born. Your mom had it. Maybe her mother did too. So do your aunts, your cousins, and maybe even your nieces are starting to show early signs. So this is just what your nervous system does, permanently, end of story.
It isn't the end of your story. It's just the beginning.
What Genes Do
In "Naming It," we talked about genetics as well. Genetics plant the seed. But your daily life decides whether it takes root.
Think of your genes more as possible instructions, not absolute commands. A gene for a particular protein doesn't mean that protein gets made all the time. It means the instructions exist, sitting in your DNA, available to be read — or left unread, depending on what your body needs and what it's been exposed to. Having the instructions is a different thing entirely from those instructions being followed to the letter, constantly, no matter what.
That distinction is the entire premise of epigenetics.
Why the Human Genome Project Didn't Settle This
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Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, science made a huge bet: map every single gene in human DNA, and we'd finally understand what makes us sick, what makes us well, and why. The Human Genome Project delivered on the mapping — every gene, catalogued, by 2003.
Then something unexpected happened. Having the full map didn't answer the questions we had. Plenty of diseases with a clear genetic component still couldn't be explained by the genes alone. Identical twins, carrying identical DNA, kept turning up with different diseases, different outcomes, different lifespans. The instructions were all there, fully documented — and they still weren't the whole story.
That gap is what pushed epigenetics from a niche curiosity into one of the most active fields in biology. Having the map wasn't enough. We're still filling in what the map doesn't show — this is a field that's grown enormously in the past two decades and keeps producing new findings, including migraine specific information that didn't exist even a few years ago.
What Epigenetics Is
Think of your DNA as a cookbook, not a single meal being cooked. Every recipe in the book is sitting in your kitchen — the recipes themselves never change. But not every recipe is in your monthly meal plan. You make your favorite meals weekly, even maybe daily, but others sit untouched for years or only for special holidays. Some get made, but you customize the seasonings to suit your tastes, until it’s only kind-of the same recipe that you started with. Epigenetics is the study of what factors influence how you use your cookbook. Not the recipes themselves.
"Epi" means "on top of" or "in addition to" — epigenetics is what sits on top of your genes, controlling their use, without rewriting the genes underneath.
Now the more precise version: epigenetics is the study of how gene expression changes without changing the underlying DNA sequence. Your genetic code — the letters, the instructions — stay the same your whole life. What changes is which parts of that code get switched on, switched off, volume turned up, or volume turned down.
Two mechanisms do most of this work. DNA methylation attaches small chemical tags to your DNA that tend to quiet a gene down, like a dimmer switch turned low. Histone modification changes how tightly your DNA is wound around the proteins that package it — wound tight, a gene is harder to reach; wound loose, it's easier to access. Neither mechanism edits your actual DNA. Both change how accessible and how active each part of it is.
This is why identical twins — same DNA, same starting instructions — can end up with meaningfully different health outcomes over a lifetime. The code is identical. The expression of that code diverged based on thier unique lived experiences.
This isn't just a general biology curiosity anymore — it's being studied in migraine specifically. Recent research has found DNA methylation patterns linked to migraine risk and its subtypes, and other studies have tied methylation changes to migraine chronification — the process of episodic migraine becoming chronic. This is still an emerging field, and researchers are careful to say causality isn't fully nailed down yet. “Can epigenetics change migraine specifically” — is an active research question now, not a guess extrapolated from general biology principles.
What Changes Your Epigenetic Expression
This is the part that matters most, because it's the part you have some influence over.
Nutrition is one of the best-studied epigenetic influences there is. Your body replies on microutriets from the foods that you eat to do almost every single biochemical process in your body, including modulating your genes. Specific nutrients — folate, B12, choline — are directly involved in the methylation process itself; without them, your body doesn't have the raw materials to add or remove those chemical tags correctly. A nutrient-depleted body isn't just "low energy" in a vague sense. It may be missing ingredients needed to regulate gene expression well.
Chronic stress has a well-documented epigenetic signature, particularly on genes involved in the stress-response system — meaning prolonged stress doesn't just feel bad, it can shift how those genes are expressed going forward, plausibly making the next stressful event hit harder than it otherwise would.
Sleep, exercise, and toxin exposure all show measurable epigenetic effects too — sleep deprivation and exercise both alter methylation patterns, in opposite directions, and environmental toxin exposure has been linked to changes in gene expression relevant to inflammation and detoxification pathways.
None of this is a separate list from the basics of good health. The conversation about epigenetics just gives one more reason that all of our lifestyle can impact our health, for good or ill. It's the mechanism underneath the nutrition, hormone, and mitochondrial-health categories that come up over and over again. Healthy habits, help change how your genes can express themselves. Changing how your body functions, and therefore feels, over time.
The Limits of Epigenetics
Epigenetics gets oversold constantly in wellness spaces. Epigenetics is a new branch of sicence and companies are quick to latch onto any hopeful research as irefutable fact, and of course, they have a product to sell you based on this preliminary research.
You can’t think your way out of a genetic predisposition with a technique or a class. Every epigenetic change isn't easily reversible, and not every epigenetic mark responds the same way to the same intervention. Genetics haven't become irrelevant, either — the underlying genes still matter, and some people's wiring will always require more support than others', no matter how well every other factor is managed.
What's left, once those extremes are cleared away, is narrower and more useful than either one: gene expression is not fixed the moment you're born, and specific, known factors influence it in specific, studied directions.
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What This Means for Your Migraine
Most migraine advice treats your genetics as a ceiling — a fixed limit to work around. Epigenetics reframes it as a starting position instead: meaningfully influential, but not the whole story of what happens next.
This is the mechanism behind why root-cause work — nutrition, stress regulation, sleep, reducing what your body has to detoxify — can produce lasting change rather than just symptom management. You're not fighting your genes. You're influencing which of your genes are being expressed, using inputs your body is already built to respond to.
This process takes some time. Epigenetic shifts happen through sustained, repeated input, not a single good week — closer to how it takes months for a nutrient deficiency to develop before it takes months to correct. If you're looking for exactly which categories tend to matter most in migraine specifically — hormones, thyroid, food sensitivities, metabolic and mitochondrial function — we break each one down here.
FAQ: Quick Answers
Is epigenetics the same thing as genetics? No. Genetics is the code itself — the letters in your DNA. Epigenetics is what controls whether and how loudly each part of that code gets read. Your genetic code doesn't change; its expression does.
Can epigenetic changes be passed on to my kids? Some research suggests certain epigenetic marks can be inherited, though this is one of the most actively debated and still-developing areas in the field — not something settled enough to make firm claims about yet.
If your family history of migraine has ever felt like a life sentence, I hope this changes how that sits with you. Your genes aren’t the whole story, and we are learning more every day.
If you're ready to start working with that switch-flipping directly instead of just reading about it, that's exactly what The Migraine Resilience Academy is built for.
— Dr. Brenna Erickson DC, The Migraine Whisperer
The Migraine Whisperer is Dr. Brenna Erickson's practice focused on helping people with chronic and complex migraine build the conditions for real, lasting neurological resilience. She practices at Stockheart Whole Health in Minneapolis and works with clients online through the Migraine Resilience Academy.
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