It’s 4 a.m. Atlantis, Bahamas. A child screaming, his head pounding with pain, and his parents wondering, helplessly, what to do to ease his pain. Every time they tried to give him pain medication, he would throw up, and the nonstop headache continued. This was me at four years old — and it would become a frequent occurrence in the years that followed. Little did we know, I had eaten a candy containing the food dye, Red 40, the night before, triggering the migraine.

 

I'm Ronav Marwaha, a 14-year-old lifelong migraine patient, advocate, and founder of the app, Migraine Metrics. I grew up navigating a condition that few people around me truly understood, and I spent years in my childhood searching for answers that should have been far more accessible.

 

I'm not a doctor or a researcher, but I am someone who has lived with this condition since early childhood — someone who eventually found a path toward fewer attacks, not through medication alone, but through understanding what I was putting in my body every day. Then years of testing went by. I went through all types of testing like CT scans, MRIs, checking to see if the headaches were an indication of something more serious. Luckily, doctors did not find anything. I was left helplessly, with no direct cure for this disease. Nobody asked what I'd eaten that day or how long I'd slept. Eventually we realized certain processed ingredients were appearing consistently in the 24–48 hours before every major attack along with other triggers as well. Today, I'm armed with that knowledge and a drive to close the gap for others.

 

I have built Migraine Metrics, the app I wish I had at four years old. It lets you log what you eat, how you sleep, and the world around you, then turns that into a personalized daily risk score so you can finally see the patterns that are uniquely yours. It doesn't replace your doctor, but it gives you real data to bring to them instead of guessing. My mission is simple: to close the gap I fell through, so finding your triggers takes days, not years.