Did you know that the intensity of night time jaw clenching can lead to persistent migraine pain and chronic headaches? That’s the principle behind the newest and perhaps only preventive weapon in the war against migraine and tension headaches--a tiny one inch device fit over your two front teeth and worn during sleep. To date, over 750,000 people have used the device to quell both the intensity and frequency of migraine headaches on every continent in the world. Twenty-three million Americans suffer from severe migraine pain with the associated loss of productivity estimated at 17.2 billion yearly.

Developed by Dr. James Boyd, a dentist and long time migraine sufferer, the new mouth guard called the Nociceptive Trigeminal Inhibition Tension Suppression System, or NTI-tss, is as surprisingly simple as it is effective: 82% of migraine and headache sufferers who use the device experience and average 77% reduction of migraine pain attacks within two months. The device is easily fit at the dentist’s office, involves no surgery, and has no risk of side effects compared to pharmaceutical migraine treatments. A discrete daytime version is also available.

Approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a device not merely to minimize migraine pain, but to actually prevent it, the prototype NTI device was first designed by Dr. Boyd after he exhaustively poured through existing research on the relationship between neuromuscular tension and headaches. While the complex central nervous system origins of migraine headaches have yet to be scientifically identified, clinical studies have shown that relaxing the intensity of neuromuscular contractions in the head, neck and jaw during sleep can significantly reduce both the occurrence and the severity of recurring headache pain.

Preventing back molar and canine teeth from touching each other or another object reduces the neuromuscular intensity exerted by the temporalis muscles by two-thirds,” says dentist Howard May of Los Gatos, California, part of the first dentist-physician team to form a clinic focusing on headache prevention using the device.

“Over 8,000 dentists have prescribed our NTI-tss device so far,” says Dr. Boyd. “And for the first time, we’re hearing dentists receiving thank you calls from their patients- something that usually doesn’t happen after a root canal.”