Hey K-Man,

Good post.  Looks like you've done your homework.  Good BP for a gent of 49 and I don't think a teaspoon of sea salt a day is excessive as long as you don't over-salt your meals.  Pushing fluids never hurts and I agree that mineral deficiencies are a problem that many cluster headache sufferers don't even know they have.

It's hard to argue with your success, but as a chronic, I've had similar results from taking calcium with vitamin D, magnesium, and zinc tablets two to three times a day.  I also take Centrum Silver multi-vitamins as they contain a number of other mineral supplements like boron that helps calcium absorption.

Calcium and magnesium in these quantities act as buffers to elevate a low arterial pH back to a normal balance.  It turns out a low pH (too much acid) causes calcium to be lost more rapidly.  A low pH also acts on the body and in particular, the brain, as a vasodilator so this condition tends to make the cluster headache triggering mechanism more effective and that results in more frequent and more painful attacks.

I tracked my pH at home with pH test strips for a couple weeks taking three pH measurements of my saliva a day, morning, noon, and night then plotted out the reults in excel.  My average daily pH readings were below the normal saliva range of 7.0 to 7.5 so I started taking the mineral supplements and vitamins.  That cut the number of attacks a week in half and the few I did have were mostly Kip-4 to Kip-5.

I also measured the pH of my saliva at the start of my attacks then a second time five minutes after aborting them with oxygen therapy at a flow rate that supports hyperventilation.  The average abort time was 4 minutes and the average increase in pH following oxygen therapy was 0.4 so it's clear that respiratory alkalosis plays an important role in aborting cluster headache attacks.

Take care,

V/R, Batch