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Melatonine


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So, after several weeks of verapamil and then several weeks of verapamil + lithium and still not getting any good results, the doc scratched his head. I discussed with him that I had seen melatonine on the website of the mayoclinic in their CH section. He looked it up on the spot and a few articles in Pubmed and agreed to give that a try. Very curious to see what's going to happen. It should reduce the frequency of attacks. *fingers crossed* If anyone has any experience with melatonine (1x10mg a day), please let me know. It'll be good to compare notes.

Cheers!

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Last time I looked into it, CH'ers were finding a dose around your 10 mg at bedtime to be a good starting one.

If it doesn't do anything, others have reported bumping it all the way up into Spiny's 20mg range was required before they started seeing results for night time attacks.

During my last full blown cycle I think I tried around 9 mg with no results. At that time I didn't know up to 20 mg would be worth trying, so I didn't get that far into the experiment.

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Melatonin's a tricky thing.  The reason that it's believed to help people with CH is that melatonin is depleted in the blood of people with CH (and of course it's related to the circadian rhythms that are related to CH).  Some studies have shown it to be somewhat effective for people with episodic CH, not so much for people with chronic CH.   

Some factors for you in terms of dosage:

The quality of melatonin supplements varies greatly in the US, where it can be bought over the counter (without a prescription). European melatonin is considered to have more reliable quality, so you might have better results with less.

General (non-CH-related) studies show that younger people need less melatonin as a sleep aid than older people do (natural melatonin levels go down with age).  If I guess that you're somewhat younger than spiny, you might have good results with less. (Not that spiny is old. I'm old. The rest of you are all spring chickens to me.)

I don't know how melatonin is administered over there where you are--whether it's a tablet that you swallow, or something that you put under your tongue or in your cheek and allow to dissolve, or whether it's in chewable form.  My daughter (who is the person in my family with CH) gets very good results for sleep with .5mg (yes, .5mg) of chewable melatonin, which I bought for her after a researcher told me it was by far the most effective form of melatonin.  (However, it seems like maybe melatonin is actually a CH trigger for her when she's in cycle. One or two other people with CH have said that it seems to be a trigger for them, too.)

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others have reported bumping it all the way up into Spiny's 20mg range

I'll try cranking it up to 20mg if 10 doesn't do the trick

I should've provided more detail and worded that more clearly.

Here in the US melatonin is sold in all manner of dosage strengths, with 3mg being fairly common, 10 mg not so common.

So the CH'ers who I've seen report getting up into the 20 mg range were typically gradually bumping up from a starting dose of 9 mg in 3 mg increments, only getting as high as 18mg or 21mg if the 12mg or 15mg doses they tried on the way there still weren't working.

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