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0:00
Ladies and gentlemen,
dear colleagues.
I'm Hans-Christoph
Diener, Chair of
the Department of
Neuroepidemiology
at the University
of Duisburg-Essen.
For over 30 years,
I ran a headache clinic.
The topic of my talk is
mistakes that we made in the
past in headache trials.
You may be surprised
at the choice.
There is a very
easy explanation.
Some years ago, I was invited to
deliver a talk at
an award ceremony.
There were two people who got
an award of which I was one.
We were asked to tell about
our major achievements
in headache research.
I thought if people hear from
the first speaker about
his achievements,
it's most probably better for me
as a second speaker to talk
about some mistakes that
my colleagues and I made
in the last 30 years.
In research, we learn
from our mistakes.
0:56
This is my conflict
of interest slide.
Most of my research
has been funded by
the German Research
Council and the
German Ministry of
Education and Research.
1:08
The whole story of
triptans started in
a very peculiar way.
A pharmaceutical company
had identified that
venous vessels contain
serotonin 5-HT,
and had asked a group of
pharmacologists to
develop a drug for
venous insufficiency
targeting 5-HT receptors.
But the drug did not work.
However, safety
experiments showed that it
constricted meningeal
arteries, and at that time,
the pathophysiology of
migraine was believed to
involve vessel dilation in
the brain and meninges
during a migraine attack.
Consequently, this
led to the hypothesis
that the drug might be used
to treat acute migraine attacks.
