Some Migraine Sufferers Find Relief From Treatment To Close Hole In Heart

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- There's a surprising treatment for some kinds of debilitating migraine headaches, and it involves closing a hole in the heart.

Migraines affect about 40 million people in the United States. They have many causes and triggers, but for about 5 or 6 million sufferers, it's thought to be related to a normal hole in the heart that usually closes up at birth.

In some people, though, it doesn't, and sometimes that leads to this kind of headache.

"It was like someone literally pounding your head with a hammer over and over all the time," migraine patient Nicole Commisso said.

Commisso's migraines started when she was just 11 or 12 years old, and then got much worse when she suffered a serious concussion as a cheerleader in high school. She says her headaches got so bad, she couldn't even read.

"So I was falling behind in all of my school work. My dorm room was always dark," she said.

But her concussion had healed, and test after test failed to find a cause, until an unusual exam called a bubble test showed Commisso had a small hole in her heart called a patent foramen ovale, or PFO.

"Everybody's born with it. It's supposed to close after birth and seal up in the first few months, but in about 20% of the population, it just never closes," interventional cardiologist Dr. Robert Sommer said.

Sommer says the PFO is present in the embryo to shunt blood away from the lungs in the womb when the baby isn't breathing. When it normally closes after birth, blood is routed from the veins to the lungs where waste products are filtered out.

If there's a PFO, however, Sommer says, "whatever this stuff is that is crossing through the hole is something that can change the physiology of the brain and cause these headaches."

The fix is a kind of double umbrella device that's threaded from the groin up through the hole in the heart. One umbrella is then opened on one side of the hole and another on the other side, sealing it shut.

"It completely changed my life," Commisso said. "I would never have graduated college."

Commisso was part of a clinical trial to show that giving patients blood thinners as a test can show which migraines are probably caused by a PFO.

Sommer is now launching a national trial to definitively prove that closing the hole stops the migraines.

Not all migraines are caused by PFOs.