LSD Alleviates 'Suicide Headaches'
by Kai Kupferschmidt, news.sciencemag.org
June 27th 2011 12:38 PM
BERLIN—Patients suffering from the agony of cluster headaches will take
anything to dull the pain, even LSD, it turns out. Results from a pilot study
presented here on Saturday at the International Headache Congress reveal that
six patients treated with 2-bromo-LSD, a nonhallucinogenic analog of LSD,
showed a significant reduction in cluster headaches per day; some were free of
the attacks for weeks or months.
"Some of these patients are still reporting significant relief more than a year
after they were treated with the compound," says John Halpern, a psychiatrist
at Harvard Medical School in Boston and one of the investigators involved in
the study. "Nobody has ever reported these kinds of results."
Cluster headaches, sometimes referred to as "suicide headaches" because of the
almost unbearable pain they cause sufferers, usually involve just one side of
the face; patients often liken the pain to someone trying to pull their eye out
for hours. They can occur in bouts lasting many weeks, with several attacks a
day.
"What causes these attacks is still not clear," says Peter Goadsby, a headache
expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who is not connected
with the research. But recent studies suggest that changes in the structure of
the hypothalamus are involved. Because that part of the brain is responsible
for, among other things, circadian rhythms, the daily cycle of our body that
dictates when we sleep but also regulates body temperature and blood pressure,
it could explain the periodicity of attacks and why they seem to occur
particularly often around the solstices.
Although there is no cure, patients can sometimes cure the headache by inhaling
pure oxygen at the onset of an attack. Other treatments include blocking
calcium channels with the drug verapamil—which is used for cardiac
arrhythmia—or taking triptans, also used for migraines. Some patients have also
reported finding relief in hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin.
Those reports intrigued Torsten Passie, a psychiatrist at the Hannover Medical
School in Germany and an expert on LSD. So he, Halpern, and colleagues decided
to test 2-bromo-LSD (BOL), which was developed by Sandoz, the Swiss company
that discovered the psychedelic effects of LSD and marketed it as a drug for
some time, as a kind of placebo compound in LSD trials.
At the conference, Halpern and Passie presented the data of six patients with
severe cluster headache who were given BOL once every 5 days for a total of
three doses. All patients reported a reduction in frequency of attacks, and
five patients reported having no attacks for months afterward.
"There seems to be a long-term prophylactic effect that we cannot explain,"
Halpern says. The team has since treated a seventh patient with similar
results. "Compared to what these headache sufferers currently have available to
them, this is quite remarkable. It could lead to a near-cure-like treatment",
Halpern says. He and Passie have founded a company called Entheogen Corp. to
fund further research and are hoping to start a phase II clinical trial with 50
patients later this year.
Goadsby points to shortcomings in the research, however. "These are just a few
patients in a completely unblinded study; you would certainly expect some
placebo effect," he says. Indeed, Goadsby has done a double-blind study
comparing pure oxygen and air in the treatment of cluster headache. Twenty
percent of the patients treated with air, the placebo, reported pain reduction.
Because cluster headaches can occur in episodes and then vanish again for
months or years, it is also difficult to distinguish a drug's long-term effect
from normal attack patterns, Goadsby cautions. "Still," he says, "this is an
interesting study, and it certainly warrants further investigation."
Original Page:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/06/lsd-alleviates-suicide-headaches.html?ref=hp
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