Surgical Solution To Migraines
for a friend in Canada.
Surgical Solution To Migraines
Dec. 30, 2004
Patients undergoing the plastic surgery technique, which involvescutting muscle in the forehead, reported that their migraine headaches
disappeared, writes researcher Bahman Guyuron, MD, professor of plastic
surgery with Case Western Reserve University and the American Migraine
Center.
Based on that pattern, Guyuron and colleagues designed two surgical
techniques specifically designed to identify migraine trigger points
and treat migraine headaches. Their current study offers a report on
the patients’ outcomes.
Of the 125 migraine headache sufferers in his study, 100 got
surgery and 25 got no treatment for comparison. Starting months before
surgery, patients were injected with Botox to determine which muscles
in the forehead or the back of the head triggered their migraines. If
the injections resulted in improvement of the migraine frequency or
duration, these muscles were surgically removed.
The surgery group had the best results:92 percent of patients
had at least a 50 percent reduction in migraine frequency, duration, or
intensity. Of that group, 35 percent reported elimination of migraine
headaches and 57 percent reported improvement. Only 15 percent of
comparison patients reported good results during the one-year
follow-up.