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Ed Yeates ReportingExcruciating and unrelenting pain, pressure and sensitivity to light and sound. If you're a victim of migraines, you know what we're talking about. But what if these symptoms could be wiped away with one simple little device?
Anyone who suffers from severe migraines would find all sorts of analogies in this shop to describe their pain. A vice tightening against the head. Nails stabbing from the inside out.
Migraine Sufferer: "Maybe, maybe an army of little men with spikes driving them behind the eyes, maybe trying to push the eyeball out of its socket."
Mark Robinson, Migraine Patient: "Days at a time, unrelenting and resistant to any treatment."
Mark Robinson was diagnosed with migraines in his early twenties. Over the past 30 years they've gotten stronger. On a pain scale of one to ten...
Mark Robinson: "I've been at 10 hundreds of times, 10 being suicidal, if I were the type."
Delynn Tabile, Migraine Patient: "My mom says when I was young enough to talk, I would tell her, 'I want to cut my head.' off because it hurt so bad."
Delynn Tabile has had migraines since she was a little girl. Like Mark, they've worsened over the years. At their peak, you don't go to the office, you don't work with kids at school, you don't do anything.
Delynn Tabile: "You don't want to eat. You don't want to breathe when you have a severe migraine."
Delynn and Mark want to end their nightmares. That's why both now qualify for a unique controlled FDA clinical trial, testing a little implantable generator called PRIZM.
The first step of the implant begins here. Mark, for example, is under heavy sedation, but not enough so he can't respond to stimulus. He feels light impulses showing that Dr. Lynn Webster, who's directing the Salt Lake trials, has implanted very small wires in the right place, targeting what are called the occipital nerves.
If Mark or Delynn are among those in the study, selected at random to test the real thing, a small generator implanted just under the skin will send current up to the ends of those wires when the first hint of a migraine begins.
Lynn Webster, M.D., Lifetree Clinical Research: "By starting it, turning it on, that they'll be able to abort the headaches. We don't know yet whether that's going to work out or how often it will work out, but that's our hope."
Delynn Tabile: "When you get to a point where there's no hope and the doctors look at you and - we don't know what to do, and then this is something we might try that may work, I was totally on board."
Even though these are double blind studies where some will get a placebo, everybody participating at 15 testing centers will get the implant when the code is broken.
For more information on this study, follow the links to the website at the top, right of this story, or call 801-269-8200.
