Migraines – all in your heart?
Researchers have uncovered a link between a passageway in the heart and migraine headaches, offering the potential to cure migraine and new hope to the three million Australians estimated to suffer from migraine.
Reporting to a recent Asia-Pacific Interventional Advances Conference (APIA) in Sydney on the progress of clinical trials, Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA Dr Jonathan Tobis, said that based on results to date he was optimistic migraine sufferers will have a new treatment option in the future.
“Early indications are that by closing this passageway we may be able to cure or significantly reduce the incidence of migraine headaches,” Dr Tobis said. “In the future, millions could be treated for migraines in this way.”
The passageway between the heart’s upper chambers, known as a patent foramen ovale, or PFO, is open at birth, but closes over in all but around 25% of people.
Dr Tobis said doctors stumbled across the link when patients who had their PFO closed to prevent recurrent stroke reported their migraines had stopped. When the passage was closed, 75% of those people who had suffered from migraine found their migraines went away or were significantly reduced.
The procedure to close the PFO is very simple – a medical device, like a little button, is inserted by a cardiologist in outpatient surgery under local anaesthetic.
The connection and the effectiveness of treatments is now being extensively researched in four different clinical trials.
