Do you use nonpharmacologic approaches to treat your patients living with migraines? Which ones do you prefer?
I always like to start with nonpharmacologic approaches (also termed bio-behavioral approaches) with my patients. I talk to patients about sleep hygiene because if they don't sleep well, they're going to have more headaches. Most of my patients have issues with sleep and rarely feel refreshed in the morning. Most of them have middle insomnia; they wake up between 2 am and 4 am and cannot get back to sleep.
I also talk to my patients about eating properly. If patients don't eat on time or miss a meal, they often get headaches. While timing is probably more critical, what they eat is important also. Poor diet can lead to decreased energy, and patients can become obese. Obesity impacts headache—especially migraine. I am not sure if there are any particularly good or bad foods for migraine patients, but in general, they should eat fewer fatty foods, fewer carbohydrates, more chicken, and fish than red meat, and a lot of fruits, vegetables, salads, nuts, and whole grains. A good trick is to limit the volume of each meal; do not go back for seconds and limit desserts and alcohol.
Exercise is beneficial to decrease headaches, and the converse is even more true. Patients should start with low-impact, brief exercise like short walks and slowly build up to 20 minutes of cardio as tolerated, 3 to 5 times per week. Like poor diet choices, a sedentary lifestyle can lead to obesity and then not doing well with headaches and so on.
What are your goals for treating your patients at the start of a migraine attack?
The goals for treating a migraine attack are to reduce the intensity of the pain quickly and, if possible, make the patient pain-free in ≤2 hours. We also try to reduce their most bothersome symptom, which is usually sensitivity to light or nausea, without causing any adverse effects from the treatment. Possibly as important, we want to get the patient back to functioning at work or at home, so they need no further treatment for that attack.
Unfortunately, many of the medicines we have available do cause adverse events, which are sometimes worse than the headache itself. A patient can't continue to take a medication that causes significant side effects.
It is also critical to stop the headache quickly, as we don't want patients to take the prescribed acute care medicine and then, if they don’t feel like it’s working, proceed to take aspirin and then acetaminophen and then an anti-inflammatory tablet. The more medicine they take, the more likely they'll get medication overuse headache (MOH).
MOH is not a great name, but it does imply that patients are taking one or many medications per week to stop their headaches, not realizing that this can worsen and prolong their headaches rather than helping them. They can also experience adverse events from taking so much medication.
Finally, we want the patients to get rid of a headache so that they do not need to go to an emergency room, and we want to use medication that is cost effective and gets the patient functioning. Some medicines and devices are extremely expensive and not well covered by insurance companies but imagine the patient who takes a new medicine or uses a new device and gets better rapidly. If they hadn't done that, they may have lost a day or 2 of pay from missing work, or they might have gone to work and not done a very effective job because they were feeling miserable and couldn’t think or speak well.