Implant near eye zaps crippling headaches
Lauran Neergaard
Associated Press
Apr. 13, 2003 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Teresa Lamesch endured a constant, incapacitating headache for almost two years. The slight touch of wind blowing against her forehead caused shocking jolts of pain. Bright sunlight or loud noises could make her retch.

Heavy-duty narcotics and every other treatment failed to help.

Then Dr. Sandeep Amin tried a last-ditch experiment. He hooked a tiny electrode to a needle and tunneled it under the skin by Lamesch's left eye, stopping atop the nerve responsible for her pain. Powered by a battery implanted near her collarbone, the device continually zaps that nerve with electric pulses, blocking the Illinois woman's pain.

"The minute he put it in, the pain was gone," a grateful Lamesch said.

An estimated 20 million Americans suffer severe headaches, and as many as 10 percent of them have intractable head or facial pain. Treatment after treatment fails. Some are true migraines, which stem from inside the brain, but others, mistakenly called migraines, result from damaged nerves along the face or scalp.

Now a few doctors are exploring how well nerve stimulators implanted in different spots along the head could rid some of that crippling, nerve-caused pain.

People feel pain when nerve cells pass signals from one to another until the "I'm hurting" message reaches the brain.

Doctors have long implanted electrodes along the spinal cord to block certain kinds of pain from the neck down by interrupting those signals. But the stimulator had to be placed above the pain site, so blocking pain in the back, legs or arms was doable, but not in the head.

Then came the discovery that stimulating head and facial nerves at skin-deep levels, not just directly against the spinal cord, could work. First doctors targeted the occipital nerve to alleviate whiplash-like pain or back-of-the-head headaches.

Now they're starting to target frontal headaches and facial pain at the supraorbital nerve just above the eye.

It sounds logical, but "it really was surprising" to headache specialists that this new use of the implants seems to work well, said Dr. Robert Levy, a neurosurgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital who has implanted stimulators in the foreheads of four people so far. The first two he treated have reached the two-year mark pain free.

Nerve stimulation "has done wonders for this kind of a headache," agrees Amin, an anesthesiologist and pain specialist at Chicago's Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center, who implanted Lamesch and another patient who suffered unrelieved headaches after brain surgery.