Nasal surgery to relieve obstructed breathing can reduce or eliminate chronic headaches in selected patients, reports a paper in the December issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).

Eighty-five percent of patients undergoing functional nasal surgery had at least partial improvement in their headaches, according to a research summary and update by Ahmed M. Afifi, MD, and colleagues of University of Wisconsin, Madison. They write, “These results suggest that the use of nasal surgery to improve headache symptoms is a viable treatment option in appropriately selected chronic headache patients.”

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