Oral negative pressure in amelioration of tension headache in 20 patients with microcirculation disturbance

Rong LI; Jian ZHANG; Xiaohong MU; Zigang ZHAO; Yankai LIU; Xuefeng ZHANG

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND:

Tension headache means contraction headache or oppressive headache in bilateral occipital-cervical part or whole head. Its pathogenesy bas not been completely known yet, which may be related to many factors and the conventional therapy is drug heteropathy but the effects are different, especially on patients with chronic disease and side effects will be induced by long-time intake of drugs.

OBJECTIVE:

To explore the curative effect of oral negative pressure on patients with tension headache and its mechanism of ameliorating microcirculation disturbance.

DESIGN:

Case-control observation.

SETTING:

Department of Pathophysiology of Hebei North University.

PARTICIPANTS:

Twenty patients with tension headache in the Department of Neurology, First Affiliated Hospital of Hebei North University from December 2001 to June 2002 including 12 females and 8 males,aged 18-28 (mean 23.4) with the disease course of 1-6 years, were randomly divided into therapeutic group and control group with 10 patients in each group.

METHODS:

The oral negative pressure instrument was applied. Put the negative pressure exerting equipment in the optimal position of mouth, adjusted the negative pressure to (0.05±0.01) MPa. The therapeutic time was 10 minutes each time (5 minutes for the first time) once a day with the time fixed. There were 5 days in one course and totally 3 courses. Put the negative pressure exerting equipment into mouth of patients in the control group for 10 minutes each time without exerting negative pressure. Quantitative evaluation on pain was performed with visual analogue scale (VAS)method, excellent as the VAS score decreased above 70%, effective as the VAS score decreased between 30% and 70%, invalid as the VAS score decreased below 30%. XTL- Ⅱ type microcirculation micro-television system was used to observe the changes of nailfold microcirculation by magnifing 260 times. The first row nailfold of left ring figure was checked conventionally, state of microvessel, micro-bloodstream and peri-loop were recorded and degree of microcirculatory disturbance was quantitatively analyzed according to TianNiu 's weighing integral method.MAIN OUTCOME

MEASURES:

The therapeutic effect after three courses and results of microcirculation observation.

RESULTS:

Totally 20 included patients were involved in the analysis of results. VAS scores of 7 patients in the therapeutic group decreased above 70% (70%), while no patient in the control group; VAS scores of 2 patients in the therapeutic group decreased from 70% to 30% (20%) and one patient in the control group (10%); VAS scores of one patient in therapeutic group decreased below 30% (10%) and nine patie nts in the control group (90%). Negative pressure could obviously ameliorate the microcirculation disturbance and enable it to recover from moderate before treatment to nearly normal with the total score decreased from (4.18±0.68) points to (1.97±0.41) points (P ＜ 0.01).

CONCLUSION:

Oral negative pressure has a significant curative effect on patients with tension headache. Its mechanism may relate to the improvement of microcirculation and the adjustment of nervous functional disturbance.