Oxygen therapy could ease migraine

Oxygen therapy could offer some relief to adults who suffer from debilitating migraine and cluster headaches, new research indicates.

Migraine headaches are extremely painful and usually occur with other symptoms such as nausea, vomiting and painful sensitivity to light and/or noise. Cluster headaches cause sharp, burning pain on one side of the head.

Estimates indicate that 6% to 7% of men and 15% to 18% of women suffer from severe migraine headaches, and cluster headaches effect about 0.2% of the population. Migraine currently affects around 400,000 people in Ireland.

Doctors commonly rely on a number of drug therapies to both treat and prevent migraine and cluster headaches, but some also prescribe oxygen therapy. Australian researchers carried out a review of nine small studies involving 201 participants. Their aim was to determine whether inhaling oxygen actually helps with these headaches.

"We wanted to locate and assess any evidence that oxygen administration was a safe and effective treatment for migraine or cluster headaches. We hoped this would assist physicians in making effective treatment decisions in this area," explained Michael Bennett of Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney.

The researchers examined studies that evaluated normobaric oxygen therapy and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Normobaric therapy consists of patients inhaling pure oxygen at normal room pressure, and hyperbaric therapy involves patients breathing oxygen at higher pressure in a specially designed chamber.

Although the studies did not specify each patients' response to treatment, they reported a significant increase in the proportion of patients who experienced relief from their migraines after 40 to 45 minutes of hyperbaric oxygen, compared to placebo therapy.

For cluster headaches, a significantly greater proportion of patients experienced relief of their headaches after 15 minutes of normobaric therapy, compared to placebo therapy.

However, the impracticality of oxygen therapy may constitute a drawback.

"This (oxygen therapy) would not be practical as the headache comes on fast and does not last long, so there would not be time to get the patient to the chamber," said Dr John Kirchner of the Kirchner Headache Clinic in Nebraska, who has treated thousands of patients suffering from a variety of headaches, but does not include oxygen therapy in his patient’s treatment plans.

Dr Kirchner's treatment for migraine includes avoiding triggers, taking preventive and symptomatic medications and undergoing behaviour modification.

The research is published in The Cochrane Library.

[Posted: Thu 17/07/2008]