"Hot sauce in the nose for cluster headaches?"
Your nose will start running, hurting,and sneezing.
Capsaicin is the burning component of hot peppers.
Why would you do such an experiment?
Anyone who's handled the compound in the lab
knows that if it gets up your nose
it causes an intense burning sensation,
however this phenomenon has not been formally investigated.
Therefore it appeared worthwhile to study the effects
produced by the topical application of capsaicin
in the human nose.
It therefore appeared worthwhile because
it had never been done before? OK...
So they took some medical students
dripped some in their nose
and they started sneezing, burning, and snotting.
Describing the pain as like 8 or 9 on a scale of 1 to 10.
No surprise, but here's the interesting part.
What do you think happened
when they repeated the experiment the next day?
You'd think they might be sensitized to it,
still all irritated and so it might hurt even worse,
but no, it hurt less.
Then they did it again the next day
and the next.
By day 5 it hardly hurt at all,
they didn't even get a runny nose, no sneezing.
Came back the next week, day ten and still nothing.
Sheesh, were they like permanently numbed?
No, after a month or so the desensitization wore off
and they were back in agony whenever
they tried rubbing it in their nose.
What the researchers think is happening is that
the pain fibers, the nerves that carry pain sensation,
dumped so much of the pain neurotransmitter
called substance P that they ran out.
Day after day of this the nerves had exhausted
their stores and could no longer transmit pain messages
until they made more substance P from scratch,
which takes a couple of weeks.
This gave researchers an idea.
There's a rare headache syndrome called cluster headache.
It has been described as one
of the worst pains humans experience.
Few, if any, medical disorders are more painful.
It's nicknamed the "suicide headache"
because patients often consider taking
or have taken their lives over it.
It's thought to be caused by arterial dilation
putting pressure on the trigeminal nerve in the face.
Treatments involve everything
from nerve blocks to botox to surgery.
But hey, that same nerve goes down to the nose.
What if we cause the whole nerve
to dump all its substance P?
"Preventative effect of repeated nasal applications of capsaicin in cluster headache".
Same as before, capsaicin in the nose
and by day 5 they could hardly feel it any more.
Note though that these were cluster headache sufferers
and so what was rated as an 8 or 9 on the pain scale
by the whimpy medical students was like, maybe a 3 or 4
by those used to the violence
of the cluster headache attacks.
Having achieved desensitization,
what happened to their headaches?
Well cluster headaches are one-sided headaches,
you only get pain on one side of your head.
So those who had rubbed capsaicin in the opposite nostril,
on the wrong side of the head,
nothing happened.
They started out having like 40 attacks a day
and a month later the headaches were still going strong,
but those that rubbed the capsaisin in the nostril
on the side of the head where the headaches were,
cut the average number of attacks in half.
And in fact half the patients were cured!
The cluster headaches were gone completely.
All in all 80% responded,
at least equal if not better
than all the current therapies out there.