June 22, 2006 — An electronic device that emits a magnetic field could offer relief for millions of people who suffer from migraine headaches.
The device, tested by Yousef Mohammad, an assistant professor of neurology at Ohio State University Medical Center, administers a therapy known as transcranial magnetic stimulation.
The therapy, its proponents claim, painlessly "resets" hyperactive neurons associated with the disease.
"The patients feel a little pressure, but that's all," said Mohammad, who presented the results of a preliminary study today at the annual American Headache Society meeting in Los Angeles.
Only since that late 1990s have doctors begun to understand that hyper-excited neurons — not vascular constriction — are at the root of migraines.
The hyper-excited neurons set off otherwise normal neurons nearby in a chain reaction of dysfunction that spreads quickly over the brain.
About 25 percent of migraine sufferers experience the spread of hyperactivity as an aura — seeing shooting stars, zigzagging lines, flashing lights, and feeling a tingling sensation, among other things — an hour before the migraine sets it.
The device is meant to interrupt that chain reaction before it leads to the pulsating headache, sensitivity to light and sound, and vomiting associated with the headache.
In the study, patients were asked to come into the hospital at the onset of an aura.
A doctor placed the stimulator at the back of the patient's head and administered two pulses, 30 seconds apart. The strong magnetic field shocks the hyperactive neurons, Mohammad reported, resetting them to their normal state.
Of the 42 participants in the study, 19 received a placebo pulse.
According to Mohammad, 69 percent of those receiving the stimulation reported had little to no pain two hours after treatment, compared to 48 percent of those in the placebo group.
Eighty-four percent of those who received the treatment reported having no sensitivity to noise compared to 17 percent of those in the placebo group.
However, according to professor Peter Goadsby, a migraine researcher for the Institute of Neurology at University College London, the numbers suggest the device did little to help the patients.
"If you did nothing and just stood there and got a fifty-fifty chance of getting better, what does the stimulation add on top of doing nothing?" he asked.
"That doesn't mean it's not interesting," he said. "It's just not a proven thing."
Mohammad is refining the device.
Soon, he plans to embark on a larger study and said the device could be in use in as little as a year.
