TNF and migraine disorder: Also Empl et al. 2003 [23] suggested that TNF-alpha could contribute to migraine pain generation and in their study of TNF-alpha and its soluble receptor sTNF-RI, they found that migraine patients tended to have less concentration levels of sTNF-RI (794 +/- 158 pg/ml) than controls (945 +/- 137 pg/ml) [23].