Botox 'can alleviate severe spinal headaches'

Washington, Apr 14 (ANI): A new study has claimed that Botox could be instrumental in relieving terrible spinal headaches.

According to the study conducted at Mayo Clinic, Botox can be used in pain management in patients suffering from incapacitating spinal headaches caused by low levels of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF).

The successful treatment also offers new insight into Botox and headache treatment generally.

Remarkably, the only known way to alleviate pain, until the discovery of analgesic properties of Botox, was to lie down.

Low CSF pressure headaches are caused by an internal spinal fluid leak. he headaches are most commonly triggered by a lumbar puncture through which the CSF leaks out causing the brain to sag.

Conventional treatment is known as blood patch, which includes injecting a patch of the patient's blood over the puncture hole.

Before she sought help five years ago from Michael Cutrer, and Paul Mathew, neurologists at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, the patient in the case study had suffered from low CSF pressure headaches for 25 years.

For most of that time she only felt better while lying down, resulting in curtailment of her day-to-day activities.

The patient has received Botox for three years and the results have been consistently positive.

After every administration of Botox, improvement would last for three months before pain returned, necessitating another dose.

The doctors said that they administered Botox because they had little else to offer to the subject.

The intensity of the patient's headaches dropped from eight out of 10 on a visual pain scale to three out of 10, "to everybody's surprise she made a remarkable improvement," said Cutrer.

While botox cannot eradicate the pain completely it can help the patients to live a relatively normal lives.

The study was recently presented at the American Academy of Neurology meeting in Hawaii. (ANI)