Cosmetic Op May Cut Migraine Pain

July 31, 2009— -- It's a debilitating pain that affects over 10 percent of the population -- some 30 million people in this country. Nearly one in four households have someone afflicted by migraines.

And no one knows that better than Theresa Schenk.

"I had the migraine syndrome for 20 years, and it really did own my life," Schenk, 62, said. "It was depressing, it was debilitating; it was something of a nightmare."

For two decades, no drug or treatment could help make the pain go away for the Willoughby, Ohio woman. And Schenk is far from alone; for many with migraines, standard treatment just doesn't work.

"There's a subset of patients who have what we call chronic migraine," said Dr. Lawrence Newman, director of the Headache Institute at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York. "Many of those people are quite treatment resistant. Why? We're not really sure.

"I tell our patients it is a life-altering condition," Newman said. "Having a migraine interferes with the person's life, their family members, their friends, their co-workers."

But now there may be new hope, from a common plastic surgery procedure – a discovery Dr. Bahman Guyuron, chairman of the Department of Plastic Surgery at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland said he stumbled upon largely by accident.

"I operated on a patient who came for a follow-up after a forehead lift," Guyuron said. "Not only did she like the way she looked, she didn't have migraines headaches for six months since the surgery."

Other migraine suffering patients told him the same thing -- the forehead lift had made their migraines disappear.

While the origins of these headaches are often a mystery, research shows that the irritation of certain facial nerves by nearby muscles might be to blame in some cases.

Guyeron tells ABC News, that would explain the improvement his patients reported following a forehead lift because "what I do is remove the forehead muscles that pinch the nerve."

Doctors have also noted that patients treated with Botox often report migraine relief. Researchers believe that Botox relieves the source of these migraines by paralyzing the muscles surrounding these facial nerves. But could surgery offer a more permanent solution?