From Wired:
“There’s a huge amount of suffering that’s happening that we could solve,” says Ted Price, professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas, Dallas, and an author of the Brain article. “As a field, it would be awesome to start having some success stories.”
Price and his colleagues emphasize that the finding needs further study. But it suggests that a new type of migraine drug that targets a neuropeptide known as CGRP might be broadly effective for chronic pain in women, he says. Women greatly outnumber men among migraine sufferers, and women made up about 85 percent of the participants in the Phase 3 clinical trials of the three anti-CGRP drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2018. Price wonders if the anti-CGRP drugs aren’t specific to migraines—but to women. His work with mice suggests that the drugs don’t work in males, but block pain in females. “CGRP is a key player in lots of forms of chronic pain in women, not just migraine,” he says.
