For the 39 million Americans who experience migraine headaches, noninvasive devices offer a new option for stopping painful symptoms. Insurers, however, are giving the devices the cold shoulder.
The Medicare Policy That Disrupts Care for Headache, Movement Disorders Patients
Migraine Disease: Then and Now
By Mary Franklin, MA
This fall, Congress introduced a first-of-its-kind resolution that acknowledged the ways migraine disease affects millions of Americans. For me and the headache and migraine disease community, the action was acknowledgment of how far we’ve come in gaining recognition of the debilitating condition that affects 39 million Americans.
New Medicare Approval Requirement Delays Treatment
Survey: Pandemic Complicates Migraine Disease Care
Congress Spotlights Migraine’s Impact on Women
Relief Out of Reach for Patients with Cluster Headache
Watching the needle move
Health Plan Barriers Threaten Migraine Treatment
The Telemedicine Solution
Recognizing Migraine’s “Painful Truth”
Mississippians Struggle for Medication Access, Again
Headache Experts Lament Growing Treatment Barriers
“Restrictive insurance policies keep patients from the very medications that can prevent and treat [headache and migraine disease],” asserts the inaugural position paper from the Alliance for Patient Access’ Headache and Migraine Disease Working Group.
Chronic Migraine, Chronic Insurer Denials
“It was so bad. It just wouldn’t quit.” Sara, a new patient, was sitting in my office describing a migraine attack that had led to a recent hospitalization. Except it wasn’t exactly the migraine that led to hospitalization. It was, I found out, an attempted suicide, prompted by the relentless impact of chronic migraine.
Health Plan Barriers & Migraine Are a Losing Combination
Amplifying the Migraine Community's Voice in ICER's Value Assessment Process
Wide Variation in Triptan Coverage Across Commercial and Government Health Plans
Insurance coverage of triptan medications varied widely between health plans and imposed quantity limits, step therapy, prior authorization requirements, and multiple co-payment tiers, according to findings published in the July 9 online issue of Headache.
"The complexity and convolution of finding and understanding much of the insurance information was a bit dismaying," first author Mia T. Minen, MD, chief of headache research in the division of headache medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center, told Neurology Today in an interview.
Dr. Minen noted that given the overuse of opioids in the US, "key players might realize that they should work on improving access to non-opioid therapies… In addition, with the increasing likelihood of more expensive migraine medications coming to the market, such as the calcitonin gene-related peptide antagonists, insurance companies might decide to lower the barriers of these cheaper alternatives," she said.
Read more at Neurology Today.
Stanford clinical trial on migraines seeks participants
Of the 37 million Americans who suffer from migraines, a few million progress to a chronic stage of having them more often than not. Stanford investigators hope to find out why.
Read more at Stanford Medicine News Center.
Letter to the Editor: Research, treatment needed for migraines
On July 4, my husband handed me the front page of the New Haven Register and said, “You could have written this.” It contained the article concerning the hidden challenges of suffering from migraine.
Read more of this letter to the editor from the New Haven Register.
Awareness Month Highlights Migraine’s Impact, Lack of Treatments
Some wore shades, others “showed purple.” But advocates across the board used June’s Migraine & Headache Awareness Month to draw attention to a condition whose patients face debilitating symptoms and far too few treatment options.
Their efforts revealed several common themes.
More at Institute for Patient Access
