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Aura often accompanies migraine
Are you one of the estimated 30 million people who live with migraine pain? If so, you may also be among the 40 to 50 percent of migraineurs who do not respond to conventional medical treatment options. But now you may be able to get help from an alternative source: magnets.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation
A ground-breaking therapy called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has proven successful in providing relief for people who have chronic migraine with aura. TMS involves delivering a focused, painless, and safe magnetic pulse through the skull. The pulse only takes a millisecond, but it is powerful enough to disrupt the abnormal brain waves associated with an aura, and thus interrupts the phenomenon before it develops. A hand-held TMS device is used to deliver the pulses of magnetic stimulation.
Experts conceived of TMS after decades of believing that migraine pain with aura originates with constriction of the blood vessels. The aura is then followed by vascular dilation, which leads to a painful headache.
In the late 1990s, however, scientists suggested migraine was caused by super-excited neurons—a condition called neuronal electrical hyperexcitability. This concept led experts to develop TMS. The technique works, say investigators, because the magnetic stimulation blocks the wave of neuronal excitation, which is the biological system through which neurons are stimulated to fire in migraine.
Studies of transcranial magnetic stimulation
Investigators from two universities—Ohio State University Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco, have been studying TMS with much success.
In a randomized, placebo-controlled study in Ohio, 164 patients were treated using transcranial magnetic stimulation. Thirty-nine percent reported having no pain two hours after treatment, compared with 22 percent in the placebo group. Results of the study were presented at the annual American Headache Society meeting in Boston in June 2008.
At the University of California, researchers conducted an animal study in an attempt to understand how the magnetic pulses interact with the brain to relieve pain. One of their main discoveries was that use of TMS has a biological basis for working for people with migraine with aura. The researchers believe their findings offer neurologists a potentially new approach for people who have migraine with aura. Their findings were reported at the 2009 Annual American Academy of Neurology meeting.
Information on migraine
For more information on migraine and migraine treatment options, you can contact the following:
Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale
Migraine Research Foundation, New York
Southwest Pain Management Associates, Phoenix
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