Migraine attacks in the pharmacy: a survey in Piedmont, Italy

Headache patients often consult a pharmacist in an attempt to obtain momentary pain relief without having been given any previous expert advice. A specific questionnaire was distributed to the pharmacies in order to assess the patterns of use and dispensing of analgesic medications to the headache patient who turns to the pharmacist for relief of a painful attack. This study aimed at identifying migraine patients who self-medicated, with further end points including whether these patients shared any particular clinical characteristics, the most common type of analgesic medications used, and what, if anything, was recommended by the pharmacist; lastly, which health care professional, if any, routinely managed the patient’s headaches. A total of 9,100 questionnaires were distributed to the pharmacies and the complete 3,065 were included in the database. The ID Migraine Screener Test was used to classify subjects into 4 groups: “Definite migraine” (3/3 positive answers: n = 1,042; 34 %), “Probable migraine” (2/3: n = 969; 31.6 %), “Unlikely migraine” (1/3: n = 630; 20.5 %), and “Other headaches” (0/3: n = 424; 13.8 %). Only Definite and Probable migraines (n = 2,011) are considered in this paper. Amongst the drugs usually taken by the patients, NSAIDs were more common in the Probable migraine group (60.7 %) than in the Definite migraine (44.7 %) group (p < 0.001). On the contrary, triptans were more commonly used by the Definite migraine group (42.9 %) than the Probable migraine (23.7 %) group (p < 0.001), and combination drugs were preferentially (p < 0.001) chosen by the Definite (13.8 %) rather than the Probable migraine group (8.7 %). A total of 29.2 % of respondents reported that for the management of their headaches, they did not avail themselves of any type of professional healthcare, such as their general practitioner, a headache specialist, or a Headache Center.