Anybody take this with success for CH's?

I had to look that one up!  Not a clusterhead myself, but I'm not seeing where it would help the actual headache itself  (might work wonders for my migraines though if it didn't cause liver damage).


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Haven't heard of that one  - it is billed as a 'muscle relaxant' but a quick scan of the literature shows it also seems to interfere with neuropathic pain, spasms, and other things. It also interferes with excitatory amino acid like glutamate (which Namenda does) .... not really sure if it would help or not.

It has been used on trigeminal neuralgia, but its effectiveness for that is not clearly established..

Not much literature on the use with CH. A VERY small clinical trial seems to have been conducted on chronic CH patients. Found an excerpt and a site where the full text is available.

"Tizanidine for Chronic Cluster Headache"
Roberto D'Alessandro, MD
Institute of Clinical Neurology Via Ugo Foscolo 7 40123 Bologna, Italy

Franco Granella, MD
Parma, Italy

Arch Neurol. 1996;53(11):1093.

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Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.


"The treatment of chronic cluster headache is based on a few proven drugs, namely lithium salts, corticosteroids, methysergide maleate, and verapamil hydrochloride.1 However, some patients do not stop having attacks, despite treatment with 1 or more of these drugs. More recently, transdermal clonidine was proposed as a possible effective and safe treatment.2 This drug may act by reducing the sharp fluctuations of the sympathetic nervous system occurring during the attacks,3 by inhibiting the central sympathetic pathway. Tizanidine, an imidazoline derivative, usually used as a central muscle relaxant, is structurally similar to clonidine and seems to act through central 2-receptor agonistic activity.4 We treated 5 consecutive patients with chronic cluster headache resistant to previous treatments with tizanidine as add-on therapy. Results are summarized in the Table. In 3 patients the attacks ceased and any other treatment was discontinued, in 1 there was a marked reduction . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

When I see only one article and that from 1996--I call
it a dead fish.

Bob Johnson wrote on Mar 27^th, 2010 at 3:50pm:

When I see only one article and that from 1996--I call it a dead fish.

I dunno - I think lots of promising leads get abandoned because of funding issues. CH isn't a high research priority.  I'm not saying this med is  great (or worthless) for CH .... just that we don't really know.

Interesting that, though the sample is very small, as an add on therapy it seemed to help some chronic patients.

The med appears to display similar properties to Topamax and may be something that works for some who show adverse effects to Topamax as add-on or combo. Perhaps worth discussing with your doc. Tizanidine does find more regular use in Migraine prevent, it appears.

But as Bob says, why did nobody, if no the author himself, run with it in the past 15 years?