Early Responses in Randomized Clinical Trials of Triptans in Acute Migraine Treatment. Are They Clinically Relevant? A Comment

One can question the clinical relevance of early headache responses after oral and intranasal triptans. Thus, for pain-free the early responses were significant but in absolute values they were only a few percentages: the therapeutic gains (TGs) were 1.8% (95% CI = 0.3-3%) for oral almotriptan 12.5 after 30 minutes and 1.0% (95% CI = 0-2%) after intranasal zolmitriptan 5 mg after 15 minutes. These results are compared with subcutaneous sumatriptan 6 mg which has TGs of 11% (95% CI = 7-15%) to 14% (95% CI = 11-17%) for pain-free after 30 minutes. Subcutaneous sumatriptan has a 2 times higher response rate than intranasal zolmitriptan and is 5 times more effective than oral almotriptan at these early time points. It is concluded that if a very early and clinically relevant effect is desired then the migraine patient should use the subcutaneous administration form of sumatriptan.