Coenzyme Q10

I thought, for the sake of my fellow sufferers out there (none of whom seem to be reading me, but oh well) I'd talk a little about Coenzyme Q10, which has improved my quality of life lately. I superstitiously fear to say anything in case I somehow jinx myself -- but just in case it could help anyone else, I feel obliged to put in my two cents on the subject.

I have other things going on -- other treatments I'm looking into, but I'll try to get to that soon. Hopefully I will have good things to report -- but there are tedious complications to getting cleared through insurance etc. and I don't feel up to delving into all that in my currently scattered state of mind.

Anyway -- I don't remember where I read about CoQ10. But I read about a clinical trial that showed a good percentage of people who took the supplement for four months and reported a 50 percent reduction of headaches. Well -- 50 percent isn't anywhere close to where I'd like to get, but hey, I'll take what I can get.

I bought the stuff and took the first dose before leaving the parking lot of the health food store. I was feeling that familiar queasy, pre-headache pain that has become such a source of dread for me -- always wondering if it' going to stay a headache, or if it's going to segue into the horror of migraine. Anyway, it seemed to help right away. And I began taking it every day. I wasn't sure how much to take at first. I think in the study it said something about people taking between 100 and 300 mg -- or maybe I read that somewhere else. I started with 100, but that didn't seem quite enough, so I upped it to 200 after a few days.

Here's a weird thing -- in the research about using it for migraine, I read that it should be taken as a preventative, but wasn't effective to abort an attack, but one evening I was at work and felt a headache coming on and it was starting to ramp up and I didn't take medicine fast enough and I thought, "here we go." For some reason -- I don't remember really even thinking about why I was doing it -- I took another 100 mg of the CoQ10 -- and the headache faded away!

So -- pretty cool, right? I've used it a few times like that and it seems to work some of the time. BUT -- and of course there's a but -- there are some side effects and I've found I really shouldn't take more than 200 mg per day. Otherwise I get a fairly unpleasant stomach ache and it also aggravates my insomnia. But I feel that, at least for now, it has been helping me keep my medicine use in check. I'd been trying to alternate Exedrin with the Maxalt, but I guess I was using it too much because by the beginning of November it started really ripping up my stomach and I had to cut waaaaay back -- like I didn't take it for more than a month to make sure I gave my stomach lining time to recover. Since then, I've cautiously used it 2-3 times without too much distress, but I'm trying not to use it more than once or twice in any two week period.

So -- I would feel comfortable recommending CoQ10 to any migraine suffer. Possibly people with less medicine sensitivity than I would be able to use it without any side effects at all.

I'll get back to ya on the other stuff I mentioned.