Congratulations on an excellent year of research and thank you for your contributions to this cause area!
To offer a perhaps under-explored research thread in the treatment and mitigation of cluster headaches and migraines, which I haven’t seen in pieces from HLI or OPIS, there appears to be moderately high efficacy (for n=18) of a ketogenic diet on reduction in incidence of such headaches:
“Of the 18 CCH patients, 15 were considered responders to the diet (11 experienced a full resolution of headache, and 4 had a headache reduction of at least 50% in terms of mean monthly number of attacks during the diet)” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5816269/).
Thanks for your comment and for bringing this to our attention. One of the pleasures, but also pains, of SWB research, is that there is simply an enormous scope of it; basically everything impacts well-being one way or another. The result is that many potentially fruitful avenues of research are left unturned.
I don’t expect we’ll be pursuing this specific line of inquiry, or headaches in general, with the next year or so. The only scenarios in which I would see that change would be if (1) a major donor appeared and would (only) fund us to look at headaches or (2) we already had a lot of donors following our recommendations—we don’t have any such donors now, which is necessarily the case because we don’t have any all-things-considered recommendations(!) - and our inside view what the headaches might be more effective than our hypothetical top pick and so worth investigating.
As a hot take on your particular suggestion, this is a very small study and I’ve heard lots of horror stories about dietary research, so this causes me only a (very) minor update, sorry!
Congratulations on an excellent year of research and thank you for your contributions to this cause area!
To offer a perhaps under-explored research thread in the treatment and mitigation of cluster headaches and migraines, which I haven’t seen in pieces from HLI or OPIS, there appears to be moderately high efficacy (for n=18) of a ketogenic diet on reduction in incidence of such headaches:
“Of the 18 CCH patients, 15 were considered responders to the diet (11 experienced a full resolution of headache, and 4 had a headache reduction of at least 50% in terms of mean monthly number of attacks during the diet)” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5816269/).
Keto diets are quite restrictive, require an adaptation period (anywhere from 2 days − 2 weeks, the above study utilized an 18-day period, https://hvmn.com/blogs/blog/ketosis-how-long-does-it-take-to-get-into-ketosis-and-keto-adapt) and are often not particularly animal wellfare-friendly.
I’d be interested to explore the cost-effectiveness of an intervention based on using exogenous ketones, especially those derived from plants (somewhere around $1-2 per day? e.g. https://shop.perfectketo.com/products/powdered-mct-oil-from-coconuts-for-keto-and-ketosis, https://rspnutrition.com/products/ketobhb) as an alternative to drug-based treatment of CH. Although research is sparse, it seems probable that exogenous ketones also decrease the adaptation period to a keto diet (ethically important due to the extreme nature of these conditions). There are some reported, rather mild side effects to exogenous ketones (https://perfectketo.com/why-ketones-cause-stomach-pain/), but these seem negligible in the case of treating CH and migraines.
Thanks for your comment and for bringing this to our attention. One of the pleasures, but also pains, of SWB research, is that there is simply an enormous scope of it; basically everything impacts well-being one way or another. The result is that many potentially fruitful avenues of research are left unturned.
I don’t expect we’ll be pursuing this specific line of inquiry, or headaches in general, with the next year or so. The only scenarios in which I would see that change would be if (1) a major donor appeared and would (only) fund us to look at headaches or (2) we already had a lot of donors following our recommendations—we don’t have any such donors now, which is necessarily the case because we don’t have any all-things-considered recommendations(!) - and our inside view what the headaches might be more effective than our hypothetical top pick and so worth investigating.
As a hot take on your particular suggestion, this is a very small study and I’ve heard lots of horror stories about dietary research, so this causes me only a (very) minor update, sorry!