Regarding a published study of oxygen therapy at flow rates that support hyperventilation...  The closest we can come is a pilot study of the demand valve method of oxygen therapy as an abortive for cluster headache conducted by Dr. Todd Rozen, MD.  See the following link for details:

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Todd leads the Headache Department at the Geisinger Neurosciences Institute, in Wilkes-Barre, PA.  Royce Fishman, Michael Berger and I wrangled the needed funding out of Linde AG through BOC in the UK to pay for Dr. Rozen's pilot study.

One of the limitations of this study was it's construct.  Each participant was allowed only one attempt to abort a CH with the demand valve and one attempt with a non-rebreathing oxygen mask with an oxygen flow rate of 15 liters/minute.

One of the big advantages of using an oxygen demand valve to abort cluster headache is they don't have any means of regulating flow rates so none are specified in the Rx. 

This comes in very handy as telling the medical insurance companies you need an oxygen flow rate of 25 to 40 liters/minute to abort a CH very rapidly and reliably would create the mother of all negative responses. 

Fortunately, as an oxygen demand valve functions very similar to the second stage of a SCUBA regulator... you control the volume of oxygen inhaled from a demand valve with simple changes in the respiration rate and lung tidal volumes.

No need in specifying any thing controversial in the prescription like huff and puff on a demand valve like the big bad wolf...  just "breath a little faster than normal"...The real instructions are passed to the CH'er verbally.

We conducted the best pilot study on oxygen therapy at flow rates that support hyperventilation over a six month period starting in late 2007. 

This pilot study involved seven subjects, six men, one woman, six chronic CH'ers and one episodic.  The seven participants collected abort times and pain levels on every abort for 8 weeks using either an oxygen demand valve or a 0 to 60 liter/minute oxygen regulator and ClusterO2 mask. 

Both methods were equally effective with very short abort times...  They collected data on a grand total of 366 aborts.  I've held off in trying to get the results of this pilot study published until Dr. Rozen had published the results of his study per an agreement with him.

I've posted most of the results from this pilot study here at CH.com.  Now that Dr. Rozen's pilot study has been published the ball is now in my court to see if I can get the complete manuscript published.

In the mean time, CH'ers can use the latest method of oxygen therapy that involves hyperventilating with room air at forced tidal volume capacity for 30 seconds followed by inhaling a lung full of 100% oxygen and holding it for 30 seconds then repeating the entire sequence 4 to 5 times or until the pain is completely gone. 

This method of oxygen therapy is just as effective in aborting CH very rapidly and reliably as the oxygen demand valve method. 

The real benefit of this latest method of oxygen therapy is it can be used effectively with oxygen regulators delivering flow rates as low as 4 to 5 liters/minute as long as the ClusterO2 kit with 3-liter reservoir bag is used.

This method of oxygen therapy also consumes much less oxygen... typically 16 to 20 liters/abort.  A rapid abort using the oxygen demand valve (4 to 5 minutes) consumes 160 to 200 liters of oxygen.

You can find the latest procedure along with the optimum breathing technique at the following link.  Scroll down to post 1863.

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This post also has a chart from the pilot study we conducted that illustrates oxygen therapy with hyperventilation results in CH aborts three to four times faster than using a flow rate of 15 liters/minute...  an average of 7 minutes across pain levels 3 through 9.

Take care,

V/R, Batch