A new study from the University of Iowa and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital looks into how effective medicine is in preventing migraines in children.
By Kayli Reese
Migraine medicine has been prescribed the same for both children and adults for years, but new evidence shows this medication does not work well for improving children’s health.
The University of Iowa and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital joined on a study focusing on how usual prescribed migraine medication for children improved headache symptoms.
Christopher Coffey, the director of the Clinical Trials Statistics and Data Management Center at the UI, said previous evidence of how well migraine medication worked with children was based on adults. The effects should be the same, he said, but this clinical trial turned out to prove otherwise.
Researchers administered two types of prescribed medication to groups of children, Coffey said. He added a placebo group was also included in this study.
Dixie Ecklund, the associate director of the UI’s Clinical Trials Statistics and Data Management Center, said 30 various testing sites were set up across the country for the study.
The differences between the treatment of the placebo and the groups that received medication were found to be nonexistent, Dr. Andrew Hershey of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital said.
“Everybody got better, but the groups didn’t differentiate from each other,” he said.
This study began in 2011, Coffey said, and was supposed to last for five years. However, he said that in 2014, there was strong enough evidence that children’s migraines were improving solely from medication, and the study began to wrap up. Children were slowly taken off the migraine medication until early this year.
Both Hershey and Coffey said now there can be no guarantee children improved their migraine symptoms because of the medication, and other factors may be in play. Researchers will need to conduct further studies to see which factors may help kids and how strong the medication is in improving kid’s migraines, Hershey said.
Conclusions of the study, Coffey said, point to giving kids low doses of medication to improve their headaches for the time being, because there is no evidence this medicine is not working whatsoever. Researchers are also looking into the effects of cognitive behavioral therapy for a treatment option, he said, because migraine anxiety can be treated with this method.
Working with children in studies such as this one has not been done very often, Coffey said. The younger age of participants adds complexities to experiments, such as consent issues, he said.
Ecklund said researchers had lots of information about potential side effects of the medication to ensure kids’ safety, and assessments of behavior changes were built into the clinical trial.
The importance of testing children, she said, cannot be underrated.
“The cost of keeping kids at home from school and parents off work is too high,” she said.
Coffey said most studies done involving medicine are usually run by drug companies. However, drug companies usually do not want to compare between drugs and a placebo, he said, in case the results are not shown in the company’s favor.
With having a hospital and a university run this trial, Coffey said, the study was able to be designed and well implemented to show the most accurate results.
“We got an answer to a question no one knew in the world,” he said.
