MONDAY, Aug. 3, 2009 (Health.com) — Facial surgery that targets and removes small portions of migraine-triggering muscle or nerve tissue may offer permanent relief for some people with the debilitating headaches, a new study suggests.
“Other migraine treatments either temporarily prevent the symptoms or they may reduce the symptoms after the migraine headaches start,” says Bahman Guyuron, MD, a professor and the chair of the department of plastic surgery at the University Hospitals of Cleveland and Case Western Reserve University. “What we are offering is essentially a cure.”
In a study published in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Dr. Guyuron and colleagues looked for people who had migraines that started in a specific region on the front, side, or back of the head. The researchers injected Botox into these trigger points to temporarily paralyze the muscle; if the injections helped relieve the migraines, the patients were randomly divided into two surgical groups.
After the Botox wore off, one group had a face-lifting surgery combined with the removal of muscle tissue or nerves in the area that triggered the migraines. Fat or muscle was used to fill in the area after tissue was removed.
The second group had a sham procedure, in which incisions were made but all muscles and nerves remained intact. A total of 75 patients were involved in the study.
In the year after the procedure, 57% of those who had the actual surgery reported the complete elimination of migraine headaches, compared with just 4% in the sham surgery group. In addition, 84% of those who had the surgery reported at least a 50% reduction in migraine pain compared with just 58% in the sham group.
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Comments (3)
I am having this very surgery at this month’s end with this doctor in Cleveland, Ohio . I have suffered greatly from migraine for close to 21 years-and the brain disorder has had a depressing and devastating impact on my life.
Intersting information. i was recently reading about facelift in immersivemedical.com and was thikning of doing this procedure..
As someone who has suffered from chronic daily migraines from more than 15 years, I cannot deprive someone of the hope of improving their daily condition and I am sure that had someone told me this before my surgery I would have gone ahead anyaway, HOWEVER, just to let you know what can happen if you are not one of the lucky ones- you can make it much, much worse. I didn’t think it could get much worse than it was before the surgery, so I went ahead feeling that I had nothing to lose and my doctor had an 80 something percent success rate. I am now 2 years post surgery and I still am so tender that I cannot sleep lying down with pressure on the back of my head, I sleep in a sort of propped up position so that I do not have to put any weight on the back or top of my head. We have to try everything out there to find relief, but make sure you ask lots of questions- for example, what have patients experienced when the surgery is not considered successful.
Good luck!!!!