Migraines sufferers wait for relief
Maria Charlesworth doesn’t know a life without migraines and new research shows she is far from alone.
An Otago University and Migraine Foundation Aotearoa New Zealand survey found 23% of those who responded had chronic migraines – meaning they have migraine symptoms for half of each month or more.
Lead researcher Fiona Imlach estimated about 60,000 of the 640,000 New Zealanders who got migraines got the chronic form. She is one of them.
She ran the survey as part of an effort to get Government drug buying agency Pharmac to fund monoclonal antibody treatment drugs to treat migraines.
Pharmac’s Neurological Advisory Committee in late-Dacember recommended that three migraine medications get funding as a high priority.
Emgality is a monthly injection currently costing people $320 a month, Aimovig is an injection costing sufferers close to $700 a month, while daily tablet Qulipta is not yet available in New Zealand.
Charlesworth got her first migraine when she was 9.
“Luckily I don’t know any different,” she said. “I was just a little kid.”
In her adulthood, they came roughly every second day. “It’s like a battle against a tsunami,” she said.
Since starting self-funded Emgality about a year ago, soon after it was released in New Zealand, she was sometimes managing to go six straight days without a migraine. She hoped the other drugs would do even more.
Charlesworth stopped work three months ago and is trying to get well enough to have a second child. She and her husband had considered moving to Australia where more publicly funded drugs are available.
When she recently discovered a recommendation was going to Pharmac to give a high priory to funding for for the drugs, she was in bed with a migraine. “I just lay in my bed and cried out of relief,” she said.
Imlach, for whom Emgality drastically reduced the number and severity of migraines, started the survey because Pharmac was looking to fund the drugs, but little was known about the scale of the affliction in New Zealand.
The survey of 530 sufferers found 23% had chronic migraine, meaning 15 or more days a month. International research put the number at closer to 10%, but Imlach pointed out those with worse migraines would have been more likely to take part in the survey. The very worst had a near-continuous headache.
About half of all respondents said they had been unable to do household work due to migraines while more than a quarter had missed five or more days of school or work over a three month period.
For many, the new breed of drugs was a life-changer. “Globally, it is recognised that migraine has been under-researched and under-funded for many decades, but things are improving in other countries,” Imlach said. “It’s time New Zealand caught up.”
Imlach’s research was published in the New Zealand Medical Journal last week.