New research center in Houston aims to fight debilitating headaches

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A good article showing how the centre is well funded and looking to do lots of research.

jon019 wrote on Feb 26^th, 2016 at 3:24pm:


That's weird as it displays for me with no subscription required but could be as I'm outside the US and not exactly likely to be subscribing to a Houston paper.

It is around the setting up of the Will Erwin Headache Research Foundation which has been mentioned on her before. It is well funded, with $20m over the next 10 years and they are raising more, mainly through golf tournaments.

They have a director of the Headache Research Center who is Dr. Mark Burish, a physician with a doctorate in neurology.

And they have lots of plans for detailed research with the target being a cure for CH and migraine.

New research center in Houston aims to fight debilitating headaches
By Kyrie O'ConnorFebruary 25, 2016 Updated: February 25, 2016 8:09pm

Debilitating headaches, both cluster and migraine, affect about one in eight people. Debilitating headaches, both cluster and migraine, affect about one in eight people.
When Will Erwin was 22, he started having migraines. That was bad enough, but after about a year the pain morphed into cluster headaches.

"Doctors say it's the worst pain a person can experience," says Will's father, Jimmy. "Will said it was like having a hunting knife stuck in his eye and twisting around for four or five hours."

Houston doctors couldn't help Will Erwin, so in November 2009 he sought treatment from a Harvard doctor. In Boston, he found some relief with Chinese herbs and oxygen treatments.

"It was good for a while, but then the alternatives didn't work anymore, and he lost hope," Jimmy Erwin says.

Will took his own life in 2010. He was 24.

Debilitating headaches, both cluster and migraine, affect about one in eight people. That's roughly 36 million Americans - more than those afflicted with asthma and diabetes combined.

Three years after losing his son, Jimmy Erwin decided it was time to act. "I've got to do something about this so it doesn't happen to somebody else," he told himself.

Erwin and his wife, Pam, started the Will Erwin Headache Research Foundation. And on Feb. 16, with a pledge of $20 million over 10 years, the couple launched the Will Erwin Headache Research Center with Memorial Hermann Mischer Neuroscience Institute at the Texas Medical Center and McGovern Medical School at UTHealth.

It is the only center of its kind in the United States.

Dr. Mark Burish, a physician with a doctorate in neurology who also has completed a fellowship in pain management, will be the director of the Headache Research Center and a UTHealth neurologist and pain specialist.

Cluster headaches, the kind Will Erwin had, affect one in 1,000 Americans, "the same as multiple sclerosis," Burish says. They often begin when patients are in their 20s and 30s, he says, and, unlike migraines, occur more often in men than women.

Cluster headaches are weirdly specific and punctual: always the same side of the head around the eye, always the same times of day, often seasonal. Some patients can pinpoint the day a new cycle of headaches should begin. "It's much different from a migraine, which has no pattern," Burish says. "It is its own disease."

Beyond that, though, little is known.

"The literature on this is very thin, minuscule compared to something like migraines," says Dr. Dong Kim, UTHealth neurosurgeon and director of the Mischer Neuroscience Institute.

The center's aim is to identify a large body of headache sufferers, define a series of studies to help understand the disease better and work with researchers across the country. "It's a unique opportunity for Dr. Burish to change the whole disease approach," Kim says.

The goal, of course, is a cure.

No one wants that more than Shannon Bennett. Bennett, 45, is a disabled physical therapist who lives in Houston and began getting migraines at age 7. After puberty, the pain and frequency worsened and, in her 30s, Bennett began having migraines every day. Now, she says, the pain is constant.

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"It never goes all the way away," Bennett says. "People say, 'Oh, this is terrible, why should it happen to you?' But I feel God gives you what you can handle. God must have thought I had a lot of potential."

Bennett has tried everything, including alternative medicine. To no avail.

She wants to speak up for fellow sufferers. "Speaking for the migraine community, we have a lot to offer," she says. The new research center is a beacon of hope for people like her, "even if they only relieve the pain."

Doctors know a little about migraines (colicky babies are more likely to grow up to be migraine sufferers, for instance) but not much about cluster headaches. Some injectable drugs offer short-term relief, as do some medications on some patients.

"We have a pretty good idea which brain areas are affected but not what starts it," Burish says. Genetics seem to play some role. Smokers are more likely to have cluster headaches.

Countries with government-sponsored medicine - and, therefore, a single information database - should be good places to mine.

In the meantime, Jimmy Erwin is busy raising money, much of it from golf tournaments. Rather than funding an endowment, the money goes straight into the foundation. (He calls it "the foundation of yes" because he hears that word so often.) Erwin has been grateful for the support of the Professional Golfers Association.

Long term, he'd like to see the Texas Medical Center become "the headache capital of the world."

Everywhere Erwin goes, he runs into people touched by the disease. "One woman told me, 'You are my only hope,' " he says.

Sounds like another great migraine headache resource.

When you lump them together, you get MUCH better funding because of the sheer numbers. But at the same time you lose the specifics of what is needed for CH's that are not Migraines.

I wish that I could count the number of times we have seen this scenario played out - with ZERO net result for CH sufferers.

Marc