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Have We Reached a New Era of Migraine Treatment?
A year ago, the first drug to prevent migraines was approved. People who get headaches are hoping it’s just the beginning.
The first significant attack Michelle Tracy experienced took place in August 2004. It was the summer between her freshman and sophomore year at The University of Massachusetts Amherst. The pain, which radiated from the left side of her forehead to the base of her skull in throbbing waves, began early in the day. As the minutes and hours ticked by, the pain swelled into an excruciating force.
Her parents’ living room, where she was riding out the episode, became nightmarishly amplified. Everything was too bright, too noisy, too smelly. “It was all too much,” says Tracy. She grew dizzy. When she began vomiting uncontrollably, her mom drove her to the emergency room. Tracy sobbed the entire 20-minute ride there.
At the hospital, a CAT scan and blood tests ruled out an aneurysm or meningitis. Given her symptoms, the attending physician on duty suspected Tracy was having a migraine — a headache that lasts between four and 72 hours, is severe enough to impact a person’s daily routine, and is accompanied by symptoms such as nausea and sensory sensitivity. Tracy was admitted to the hospital overnight and given saline fluid and a cocktail of medication administered via IV for the nausea and pain; she left the hospital the next day feeling loopy, but better. “I didn’t realize that was the beginning,” she says. In retrospect, this first attack “was a demarcation,” Tracy says. There was life before the migraine attacks, and then there was life after.
Chronic migraine disorder, which a neurologist diagnosed Tracy with shortly after her initial ER visit, is defined as having 15 or more days with a headache that lasts four hours or more, in a given month. While migraine attacks are common — an estimated 20% of women and 6% to 10% of men in the U.S. suffer from them — the chronic form of the condition is more rare, afflicting an estimated 10% of people with migraine.
“You go through this trial and error with medication. You never know, ‘Is this going to help? Is it not going to help?’”
