Headaches, My Migraine History and Monoclonal Antibody Therapy

My love story - so to speak - with headaches began very early. I was a teenager when I began to experience the first very strong attacks.

Imagine having a lead helmet on your skull , which hour after hour tightens its grip more and more. Which makes your eyes throb. Which occupies all your thoughts. Which spreads to your jaw and teeth. Here is the identikit of my headache. Always the same, always the same over the years: faithful companion of my days. Soundtrack of my life both in good times and bad.

I grew up, life has put me in front of encounters and opportunities for change but my headache has always remained the same. Always so strong. Without schedules. A thousand investigations: to arrive at nothing . My headache is not linked to hormonal cycles, not even to changes in the weather and much less to stress levels.

But my migraine has two sides. It often manifests itself with powerful attacks: even three times a week. Or it arises with a single very violent attack that sometimes lasts up to two weeks.

The therapy? Symptomatic. Painkillers. Trying different molecules each time. Because what he did to me made the pain go away for a while and then stopped working .

Needless to say, the weight of this pathology on my life. On work. On family commitments. A nightmare: a sword of Damocles always hanging over my head and ready to upset the planning of holidays, appointments and work deadlines.

I tried to investigate . To try to understand if it was related to something wrong with me. My posture, my teeth, my eyes. I even had surgery on my nose: to straighten my nasal septum and remove the turbinates hoping that a respiratory problem was responsible for the problem. Nothing at all. The headache remained.

In January 2024, desperate, I try the last resort. I know that the new frontier of headaches are monoclonal antibodies. I contact a center of excellence and as a first step I am offered to participate in a trial of a new drug. It is a test on a selected group of patients of a drug already on the market and which is part of the so-called ' gepants ' new molecules used for the treatment of headaches. Ok I'm in. I am admitted to the trial and for six months I try these tablets. One a day. The first three months nothing happens (but it can happen, in the first three months of the trial it is possible that they gave me the placebo). But unfortunately nothing happens in the second trimester either: unfortunately this therapy is also a failure for me . That damned migraine is always there. It bites me and destroys me.

I have no choice but to resort to the last resort, monoclonal antibody therapy : these are new-generation drugs that act directly on the receptors responsible for migraine pain. I'll try, without much hope. One injection a month. I'll start in December 2024. Five months have passed and my headaches can be counted on the fingers of one hand: for me, a success almost equivalent to a miracle . Also because I dealt with the few attacks I had with a simple over-the-counter drug without resorting to the powerful painkillers I had used until now. I will continue the therapy for another six months: a year in total . Then there will be a break: will my body have learned to defend itself from the pain or will it still need the support of the antibody? I will keep you updated.