Reading data in migraine acute treatment studies: from clinical trials to reviews and meta-analyses

The huge amount of data regarding triptans in clinical practice provides a great opportunity to learn about their efficacy, tolerability and adverse events and offers to the clinician the background for the best treatment option in any patient, given that the patient is suitable for being treated with any of those compounds. A detailed clinical history is necessary in order to make a preliminary selection of triptan-suitable or -unsuitable migraine patients. Among the former, a secondary selection may be made, to recognise different attacks that can be successfully treated with different triptans, according to attack presentation and progression, within the same patient. Reading single original articles has become very difficult. Therefore, data are often presented in review form, which may be too partial or oriented. Systematic reviews or meta-analyses better serve to comment on data as they follow an analytic method that is based upon pooling data from original articles and comparing them using statistical aids.