Predicting Patients’ Responses to Migraine Medication
Dr. Pijpers and her colleagues recently published the results of a cohort study suggesting that cutaneous allodynia may predict how patients with migraine respond to withdrawal therapy. Nearly 75% of the 173 patients enrolled in the study reported experiencing allodynia — pain caused by a stimulus that does not normally cause pain. The study showed that absence of allodynia was predictive of a good outcome for patients after withdrawal therapy and of reversion from chronic to episodic migraine.
The ability to accurately predict patients’ responses could pave the way for personalized treatments of medication overuse headache.
A version of this article appeared in Medscape.com.