Posted by Todd (216.199.4.192) on February 19, 2000 at 08:47:09:
In Reply to: Please accept my sincere apologies posted by NicholasD on February 18, 2000 at 22:49:17:
Check out the link to OnHealth below. While you're there, you can also do a search on 'angina' if you want to better understand what it is and what it means. It's a serious signal that something major is wrong with the heart.
If there are any angina sufferers here, they probably already know how 'angina' can 'induce' a cluster. The first treatment option for angina is usual nitroglycerine. It's quick, easy and can pretty much be used as often as needed.
It's also what Dr. Goadsby used to induce attacks in the cluster patients he studied. For the general population, nitro causes headache in about 1/2 the people who use it. Since clusterheads always do everything related to head pain bigger, better, faster and stronger than the general pop, it can pretty much be counted on 100% of the time to induce an attack.
Remember, there are NO drugs which have been developed specifically and originally for clusters. Those who find that verapamil works as a preventative, or use lithium or prednisone or sansert, etc. are benefitting from the trial and error experimentation other sufferers and their docs have gone through in the past.