San Diego man says new migraine drug has ended his pain

Changing Lives

San Diego man says new migraine drug has ended his pain

Paul Best’s story

Source: The San Diego Union-Tribune 

Thumbing through his migraine journal this week, Paul Best traced his fingertip through years of personal pain.

“Here’s where I start the study and, slowly, it’s less and less and less and then this, here, 2015, no more,” the San Diego native said.

The throbbing, nauseous headaches that used to shut down his life for days at a time just stop.

“I just stopped taking notes, because they weren’t happening anymore,” Best said. “I have a completely normal life now.”

There are still times when it feels as if a migraine is sneaking up on him, but those early signs and sensitivities never seem to coalesce into the kind of pain that used to force him to regularly “lay down and suffer until it went away.”

“Now, with this, it never goes over the hump into a full migraine,” Best said.

By “this,” he means Aimovig, the first-ever migraine-preventing medication with local roots that extend to basic research performed at UC San Diego in the 1980s.

Read full story here.

You work many years to make a discovery and then it takes many, many more years before you see a drug like this. You don’t go into this expecting, necessarily, that you’ll see a practical outcome. But when you do, oh my gosh, it’s fabulous.”

–  Paul Best