Painful and disabling, migraines affect an average of 30% of the world’s population. These headaches, twice as frequent in women, manifest themselves in the form of more or less intense and lasting crises. When it lasts more than 15 days we speak of chronic migraine. Reducing the severity and number of these migraine episodes is a health issue that researchers from the King’s College London.
Their work published in the journal New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)pave the way for a new therapeutic approach that would significantly reduce the duration of migraines. The promising treatment is based on erenumab. Injections of this antibody could ultimately reduce the duration of seizures or even prevent them. The experimental treatment with erenumab targets and inhibits CGRP, a peptide linked to the calcitonin gene, involved in pain and sensitivity to sound and light, symptomatic of migraine. The British researchers conducted a test for six months on 955 patients suffering from episodic migraine. At the start of the experiment, the patients suffered from migraines on average eight days per month. 317 patients received a subcutaneous injection of 70 mg of erenumab, 319 received 140 mg, and 319 patients were administered a placebo.
As a result, 50% of participants treated with a 140 mg dose saw a halving of the number of migraine days per month.
Encouraging efficiency but to be confirmed
Another encouraging lesson from the study is that patients treated with erenumab also improved their physical health and their ability to participate in daily activities during the trial period. Erenumab has also been shown to be effective and tolerable in the long term with a safety profile comparable to that of placebo, point out the authors.
Further work needs to be done to confirm these initial results. “The effects [de la migraine] can last for hours – even days in many cases, reacted Simon Evans, director of the British support association Migraine action, quoted on the site of King’s College London. An option that can prevent migraine and is well tolerated is therefore badly needed and we hope this marks the start of a real change in the way this disease is treated and perceived.
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