Recent Developments in the Treatment of Migraine in Children and Adolescents

Only in recent years has there been a mandate, if you would, to study newer pharmaceutical agents in children and adolescents. As such, there is a paucity of well controlled clinical trials, let alone drugs that have been through registration trials in these age groups. Migraine, while less common especially in children than adults however still requires treatment. This has led healthcare providers to utilize treatments from the “adult” world in these younger patients. Even in the adult population there are relatively few agents that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or other regulatory bodies compared to the many treatments that are given for the treatment of migraine. These treatments have varying levels of evidence for efficacy and tolerability. Multiple guidelines and recommendations have been published in recent years examining the evidence based medicine of migraine treatment offering guidance oriented towards primary care clinicians and neurologists whose primary focus is not headache medicine.