Archive for March 4th, 2010
March 4th, 2010 | 
Author: The pharmacologic treatment of migraine may be acute (abortive) or preventive (prophylactic), and patients with frequent severe headaches often require both approaches. Preventive therapy is used to try to reduce the frequency, duration, or severity of attacks. The preventive medications with the best-documented efficacy are amitriptyline, divalproex, topiramate, and the beta-blockers. Choice is made based on a drug’s proven efficacy, the physician’s informed belief about medications not yet evaluated in controlled trials, the drug’s adverse events, the patient’s preferences and headache profile, and the presence or absence of coexisting disorders. Because comorbid medical and psychologic illnesses are prevalent in patients who have migraine, one must consider comorbidity when choosing preventive drugs. Drug therapy may be beneficial for both disorders; however, it is also a potential confounder of optimal treatment of either.
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Children and adolescents experience headaches as do adults and usually present with migraine and chronic daily or tension-type headaches. As some adolescents are unable to achieve headache relief after various treatment strategies, botulinum toxin type A (Botox) injections as a clinical treatment are availabe in selected cases. Botulinum toxin type A by injection has been found to be effective in the treatment of headache disorders in adults. A recent study treated 12 adolescents (aged 14 to 18 years) with Botox injections for migraine and chronic daily headache. Six patients (all female adolescents) were in long-term treatment and received Botox in the standard “migraine” and “follow-the-pain” patterns every 3 months. Effectiveness was evaluated using pain scales and a standardized quality-of-life survey at baseline and prior to each treatment session. Duration of treatment was 3-29 months. Each patient had 9-63 (average = 42) injections per treatment. All 6 long-term patients reported improvement in headache symptoms, with decreases on pain scales and an average of 33%-75% improvement in quality of life. Two long-term patients had complete relief of headaches between injection series. Four patients had only one series of injections with good results. Two patients had no improvement and refused additional injections. Consequently, Botox may be an effective treatment option for certain adolescents with intractable migraine and chronic daily headaches.
Migraine is a common and disabling brain disorder with a strong inherited component. Because patients with migraine have severe and disabling attacks usually of headache with other symptoms of sensory disturbance (eg, light and sound sensitivity), medical treatment is often required. Patients can be managed by use of acute attack therapies (eg, simple analgesics or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) or specific agents with vasoconstrictor properties (ie, triptans or ergot derivatives). Preventive therapy is probably indicated in about a third of patients with migraine, and a broad range of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical options exist. Medication overuse is an important concern in migraine therapeutics and needs to be identified and managed. In most patients, migraine can be improved with careful attention to the details of therapy, and in those for whom it cannot, neuromodulation approaches, such as occipital nerve stimulation, are currently being actively studied and offer much promise.
