Nose surgery relieves migraines?

A patient of mine just emailed me about a recent segment of the TV show, The Doctors, which featured a woman whose severe chronic migraines were cured by nasal surgery. The segment was shot a few weeks after the surgery, so it is not clear how long the relief will last in her case. The surgery involved removing a contact point, which occurs in people with a deviated septum. The septum, which consists of a cartilage in the front and bone in the back, divides the left and the right sides of the nose. If the bony septum is very deviated, which often happens from an injury, it sometimes touches the side of the nose, creating a contact point between the septum and the bony side wall of the nose.

Several small reports by ENT surgeons have described dramatic relief of migraine headaches with the removal of the contact point. If headaches are constant, then the constant pressure of the contact point would explain the pain. However, many of the successfully treated migraine sufferers had intermittent attacks. The theory of how a contact point could cause intermittent migraines is that if something causes swelling of the mucosa (lining) of the nasal cavity, then this swelling increases the pressure at the contact point and triggers a headache. This swelling can be caused by nasal congestion due to allergies, red wine, exercise, and possibly other typical migraine triggers.

This is a good theory, but it is only a theory and the dramatic relief seen after surgery could be all due to the placebo effect. The only way to prove that contact point headaches exist and can be relieved by surgery is by conducting a double-blind study, where half of the patients undergoes surgery and the other half does not. Giving both groups sedation and bringing them to the operating room will blind the patient while the neurologist who evaluates them will also not know who was operated on and who was not, making this a double-blind study. This design is also good only in theory because those who had surgery will have bloody nasal discharge and nasal packing, thus breaking the blind.

However, despite the fact that we will not see any double-blind studies in the near future, there is one way to predict who may respond to contact point surgery. An ENT surgeon can spray a local anesthetic, such as lidocaine, around the contact point during a migraine attack and if pain goes away, then surgery is more likely to help. I would not recommend anyone having surgery without such a test.