'Suicide Headaches' Drive Doc to Clinical Trial

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

I'm Richard Isaacson, director of the Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian. Today I'm going to be talking to you about something a little bit different—not Alzheimer's disease, but cluster headaches.

Cluster headaches are a very, very challenging condition from a neurologic perspective. They are very severe. Sometimes they've been called suicide headaches, in fact. So why is an Alzheimer's specialist talking about cluster headaches? Well, I'm actually a sufferer.

Back in 2013, I began having episodic cluster, where every June and December I would get what at the time I termed "migraine explosions." Well, I self-diagnosed, and self-diagnosis is not the best idea. I wasn't having migraines or migraine explosions—that's not a diagnosis that exists. I was having episodic cluster twice a year during the season changes.

In 2013, however, after suffering from these headaches that weren't effectively treated when I took the traditional sumatriptan pills, I started getting them more frequently. I ended up seeing a neurologist and another neurologist. Finally, the third neurologist who I saw gave me the diagnosis of cluster.

I was getting Botoxinjections for migraines for the first time. As the neurologist, a colleague of mine, Dr Safdieh, was injecting my head with Botox, he said, "Wait a minute.