EuroQol (EQ-5D) health utility scores for patients with migraine

Previous studies have reported health utilities for migraine patients as generally measured between migraine attacks, but health utility data for within a migraine attack are unavailable. We evaluated within-attack health utilities among acute migraine patients experiencing different grades of headache severity.

We examined data for 330 20-65-year-old adults, in good physical health, who had 1-6 moderate/severe migraine attacks per month in the 2 months prior to the screening visit. Data were collected from a multicenter, double-blind study of a treatment for acute migraine in the United States. The EQ-5D system was used to measure generic health status at baseline and 24 h post-treatment within an acute migraine attack, and patients were also asked to rate their pain level at these time points (no, mild, moderate, or severe pain). The D1 time-trade-off scoring algorithm for the U.S. population was applied. Confidence intervals were estimated by bootstrap methods.

The study population was 88% women and 78% white ethnicity, with 60% of subjects over age 40. The disutility of mild migraine pain was estimated to be 0.140 (95% CI: 0.0848, 0.1940), with a disutility for moderate migraine pain of 0.186 (95% CI: 0.1645, 0.2053) and for severe migraine pain of 0.493 (95% CI: 0.4100, 0.5654).

Within-attack disutilities estimated for migraine in this study are much greater than those reported for migraine when evaluated as a chronic health condition (e.g., valuations collected at random time points). These data can be of value in adapting results from clinical trials of migraine interventions to cost-utility policy analyses.