Burden and Attitude to Resistant and Refractory Migraine A Survey From the European Headache Federation With the Endorsement of the European Migraine & Headache Alliance

Abstract

Background: New treatments are currently offering new opportunities and challenges in clinical management and research in the migraine field. There is the need of homogenous criteria to identify candidates for treatment escalation as well as of reliable criteria to identify refractoriness to treatment. To overcome those issues, the European Headache Federation (EHF) issued a Consensus document to propose criteria to approach difficult-totreat migraine patients in a standardized way. The Consensus proposed well-defined criteria for resistant migraine (i.e., patients who do not respond to some treatment but who have residual therapeutic opportunities) and refractory migraine (i.e., patients who still have debilitating migraine despite maximal treatment efforts). The aim of this study was to better understand the perceived impact of resistant and refractory migraine and the attitude of physicians involved in migraine care toward those conditions. Methods: We conducted a web-questionnaire-based cross-sectional international study involving physicians with interest in headache care. (Continued on next page) © The Author(s). 2021 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. * Correspondence: [email protected] Neuroscience section – Department of Biotechnological and Applied Clinical Sciences and (Edificio Coppito 2), University of L’Aquila, Via Vetoio, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy Regional Referral Headache Center of the Abruzzo Region, ASL Avezzano-Sulmona-L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy Full list of author information is available at the end of the article The Journal of Headache and Pain Sacco et al. The Journal of Headache and Pain (2021) 22:39 https://doi.org/10.1186/s10194-021-01252-4