A new drug offers fresh hope to the millions of people living with treatment-resistant migraine. The compound, called erenumab, has proven successful in people who had been failed by up to four previous preventative treatments.
The drug erenumab was tested in people with particularly challenging migraines that had been resilient to treatment. The compound reduced migraine attacks by 50 percent for a third of the study participants.
Dr. Reuter and team recruited 246 people with episodic migraines who had been failed by previous treatments.
More specifically, 39 percent of the participants had tried two previous medications to no avail, 38 percent had been unsuccessfully treated with three medications, and 23 percent had tried four drugs but had no success.
Three months into the treatment, 30 percent of the migraine patients in the intervention group had the monthly number of their attacks reduced by 50 percent, whereas only 14 percent of those in the placebo group had their attacks reduced by half.
This means that those who received the treatment were almost three times more likely to have their attacks halved. Importantly, the drug did not present any side effects.
Dr. Reuter comments on the study's findings, saying, "The people we included in our study were considered more difficult to treat, meaning that up to four other preventative treatments hadn't worked for them."