Effective treatment of migraine attacks prevents chronic migraines

Several million Americans suffer from chronic migraines, headaches that occur on at least half of the days and often daily.

A new study suggests one of the way to prevent this disabling disease. In the American Migraine Prevalence and Prevention Study, people with episodic migraines (those occurring on less than half of the day each month) completed the Migraine Treatment Optimization Questionnaire and provided outcome data in 2006 and in 2007. They were asked four questions about the efficacy of their acute migraine therapies and the responses were divided into: very poor, poor, moderate, and maximum treatment efficacy.

Among 5,681 study participants with episodic migraine in 2006, 3.1% progressed to chronic migraine in 2007. Only 1.9% of the group with maximum treatment efficacy developed chronic migraine. Rates of new-onset chronic migraine increased in the moderate treatment efficacy (2.7%), poor treatment efficacy (4.4%), and very poor treatment efficacy (6.8%) groups. The very poor treatment efficacy group had a more than 2-fold increased risk of new-onset chronic migraine compared to the maximum treatment efficacy group.

The authors concluded that inadequate acute treatment efficacy was associated with an increased risk of new-onset chronic migraine over the course of 1 year. They speculated that improving acute treatment outcomes might prevent chronic migraine. However, they also said that reverse causality cannot be excluded, meaning that it is possible that those who would go on to develop chronic migraine had poor response to acute treatment because their headaches were worse and that they would develop chronic migraine regardless of how well their acute treatment worked. However, it makes a lot of sense to assume that effective treatment of individual attacks may prevent headaches from becoming chronic, especially because we know that each migraine attack leaves the brain more excitable for weeks and this makes the next attack more likely.

Effective treatment of acute attacks usually involves the use of triptans, (drugs like sumatriptan, or Imitrex, eletriptan, or Relpax, rizatriptan or Maxalt, and other), although NSAIDs, such as aspirin, iboprofen and other can also help, both alone or in a combination with a triptan. Medications that should not be used are drugs such as Fioricet or Fiorinal (butalbital, caffeine, and acetaminophen / aspirin), codeine, Percocet (oxycodone / acetaminophen), Vicodin (hydrocodone / acetaminophen). These drugs are not only ineffective, but can make it more likely that episodic migraines will turn into chronic. This also applies to other caffeine-containing drugs (Excedrin and other) and even dietary caffeine.