Experimental Surgery Blocks Migraine Pain

April 14, 2004 -- Marcey Sullivan of South Bend, Ind., has had little interaction with her two young children. Almost every day for the last four years Sullivan has been bedridden with searing headaches called chronic migraine syndrome.

"I would describe it as a dagger," she told ABCNEWS. "I just had a throbbing dagger sensation like someone kept pushing it in there, again and again."

Sullivan, 35, tried the most powerful pain medications, even morphine patches.

"Not only did they have terrible side effects," she said, "but they didn't work. I still had a headache and I was bombed. I didn't remember anything."

With nowhere else to turn, Sullivan recently tried an experimental treatment. Doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago implanted tiny electrodes in her head to block the pain.

The electrodes were inserted just under the skin over Sullivan's left eye where her migraines usually begin. A connecting wire was then tunneled under her skin, around her ear and down her neck, to a small battery pack implanted just under her collarbone.

Electronic pulses then began to stimulate nerve cells, in effect "distracting" the nerves and disrupting pain signals to the brain.

"We're activating the fibers in the nerve that sort of compete against the pain fibers," Dr. Robert Levy, a neurosurgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital told ABCNEWS. "So the stimulation we use blocks pain."

To be effective, said Levy, the patient must be able to control the number and intensity of the pulses — enough to relieve pain but not enough to be uncomfortable.

Sullivan was given a remote control she can adjust through the day. Most of the time she leaves it set at 45 pulses a second.

"It feels like a prickly, warm sensation on my scalp and forehead," she said. "But after a while I forget that it's there. I don't even notice it."

This technique of electronically stimulating nerves has been used on tens of thousands of patients to treat neck and leg pains. Now, in the first dozen cases of chronic migraines, researchers say it has significantly reduced or eliminated headaches.

"The patients that we have found so far who respond best to this treatment are those that have constant pain and those who have pain in the front and sides of their head," said Dr. Levy.

"We are talking about severe headaches, patients who have chronic migraine headaches or other types of severe headache syndromes that limit everyday lives and that haven't responded to aggressive medical or physical therapies," he added.

This week Marcy Sullivan felt another migraine starting.

But this time, she said, "I could tell it was coming and my eye started pulsing and I turned up the stimulation on it and I kind of stretched out for five minutes and went for a walk. I was fine afterwards."

"It's completely changed everything," she said. "I'm not in bed. I'm making dinner. I'm doing the homework with the kids. Playing a game. Just the basic things of life."