Cluster headaches are extremely painful headaches that occur in intermittent cycles with periods of remission in between. A sufferer could experience several debilitating headaches a day every day for weeks or a few months followed by periods without any headaches at all. These remission periods can last for months, but some patients are headache free for less than a month per year.
Cluster headaches are extremely difficult to treat, but some patients experienced some relief while using LSD or psilocybin and brought this to the attention of their doctors. Both drugs are highly controlled substances that cannot be legally consumed except under extremely rare circumstances. BOL-148 is chemically very similar to LSD but is not a controlled substance. Researchers at Harvard obtained permission from the FDA for an extremely limited clinical trial using BOL-148.
Five patients suffering from cluster headaches that didn’t respond to any other treatments were given three doses of BOL-148 over the course of about ten days. The patients all saw dramatic improvement of their headache symptoms over the course of the next sixteen weeks while experiencing only mild side effects such as lightheadedness and those only for brief periods of time. Remission periods were also extended in the patients given the test drugs.
Clearly this was an extremely small sample and it did not include any control group for comparison, but researchers hope to use these results to obtain funding for more extensive studies following more established scientific procedures. A new company, Entheogencorp, has been formed by Harvard professor John Halpern to manage further studies and, hopefully, commercialize the use of BOL-148 to treat cluster headaches.
TFOT has previously reported on other neurological research including a USC study examining the communication between different parts of the brain, how brain scans might influence marketing efforts in the future, how memories are encoded into our brains, and a study proposing that brains see color instead of eyes.
Read more about the possible use of BOL-148 as a treatment for cluster headaches at the Entheogencorp website.
