Dr Peter McAllister Offers the HCP Perspective on the Benefits of Migraine Prevention

Migraine prevention helps drive down functional disability among migraineurs, said Peter McAllister, MD, a neurologist, board certified headache specialist, and medical director of the New England Institute for Neurology and Headache.

Transcript:

The American Journal of Managed Care® (AJMC®): Can you give a brief overview of your work?

Dr. McAllister: Sure, I'm Peter McAllister, I'm a physician and neurologist and board certified headache specialist. I work at a tertiary care headache center in Stamford, Connecticut.

AJMC®: What is the prevalence of migraine in the United States?

Dr. McAllister: Migraine is a very common chronic medical condition. Estimates are that it affects about 40 million Americans in this country. So it's much larger than some other common medical conditions such as asthma or diabetes or epilepsy. Thirty-one million adults in this country suffer from migraine. Many of those who have migraine, don't receive the proper diagnosis or get the proper treatment and those are gaps that we're working hard to close.

AJMC®: In your opinion as a health care provider, what are the benefits of migraine prevention?

Dr. McAllister: Migraine prevention is designed to decrease the number of migraine days per month, decrease the severity of those attacks, make acute treatments more likely to work and be successful, and importantly, drive down what we call functional disability. When you have a non-lethal condition like migraine, the disability is measured in missing work, missing school, missing social activities, etc. If you can find a medicine that takes somebody, for example, from 10 disabling, throw-up, lay in a dark room migraines, and gets them down to 1 or 2 more moderate migraines that they can take a medicine and get back to work, that's a successful preventive.