Oxygen therapies may ease headache pain

By Amy Norton

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Two forms of oxygen therapy may help manage two types of debilitating headache pain, a new research review suggests.

In a review of nine small clinical trials, the researchers found that hyperbaric oxygen therapy showed promise for halting pain during migraine attacks. A similar treatment -- normobaric, or normal-pressure, oxygen therapy -- eased pain in people suffering from cluster headaches.

The findings are published in the Cochrane Library, a publication of the Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research.

Both migraines and cluster headaches can be debilitating. Migraines typically cause throbbing pain in one area of the head, often accompanied by nausea, vomiting or sensitivity to light and sound.

Cluster headaches cause sharp pain on one side of the head, including the eye; that lasts anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours and come in waves -- repeated attacks over a few weeks to months, followed by a period of no symptoms.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy involves breathing pure oxygen in a sealed, pressurized chamber. With normobaric oxygen therapy, patients breathe pure oxygen from a portable unit under normal conditions.

Normal-pressure oxygen has long been used for severe headache pain, and there is some evidence that hyperbaric oxygen could be helpful, but few controlled clinical trials have evaluated the therapies.

For the current study, researchers were able to find nine clinical trials performed between 1981 and 2004 involving a total of 201 patients. When they combined data from three, they found that hyperbaric oxygen therapy was six times more likely to relieve migraine pain than a "sham" (placebo) therapy used for comparison.  Continued...