Dr. Phillip Lamey, professor of oral medicine at the Royal Victoria Dental School in Belfast, recently shed some welcome light on a simple method to help prevent migraine headaches.
Dr. Lamey and his colleagues compared peptide levels in saliva samples of migraine sufferers and non-migraine sufferers. He found that people who suffered from migraines had peptide levels between 50,000 and 60,000 units, while non-migraine sufferers had levels of only around 500 units.
Keep Your Teeth From Contacting at Night
To lower the peptide levels in migraine sufferers, Dr. Lamey had 19 migraine patients wear an oral appliance while they slept that completely kept the occlusal surfaces of the upper teeth from contacting the lower teeth. Apparently, teeth-clenching at night produces the excess peptide production. The results of this study were quite remarkable.
Saliva peptide levels dropped to around 500 units in migraine sufferers wearing the appliance (the same levels originally seen in non-migraine sufferers), and the number of migraine attacks dropped to an average of only 40 percent of what these patients had previously experienced. Dr. Lamey has found that the device only needs to be worn each night for about a year—for 70 percent of his patients using the device, after one year their migraine attacks ceased completely.
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