OBJECTIVES: To characterize migraine-related healthcare resource use (HCRU) in patients who have failed at least one migraine prophylactic treatment in headache specialized centers in Portugal.

METHODS: BECOME observational study was conducted across 17 European countries and Israel between Nov2017-Aug2018 entailing part 1 (cumulative-hospital data) and part 2 (patient-level data). Part 2 included patients aged 18-65 years, attending headache specialized centers as outpatients/inpatients, migraine diagnosis, >4 monthly migraine days (MMD) and evidence of >1 prophylactic treatment failure (TF) in the past 5 years. Annualized self-reported HCRU (except medication) were calculated for the part 2 Portuguese sample.

RESULTS: The Portuguese sample (n=103) had 99% females, mean age of 43.8 (SD=11.4), mean MMD of 10.4 (SD=6.1), 40% TF1, 29% TF2 and 31% TF3+. Patients attended a mean of 3.5 (SD=4.8) neurologist visits/year, 1.8 (SD=8.9) hospital non-medical visits/year, 1.1 (SD=1.9) emergency admissions/year and 0.1 (SD=0.5) hospitalizations/year and performed 0.3 (SD=0.8) CT scans/year and 0.1 (SD=0.3) MRI/year. TF1/TF2+/TF3+ patients averaged 2.6/4.1/5.9 neurologist visits/year, 2.1/1.6/3.1 hospital non-medical visits, 1.0/1.1/1.4 emergency admissions/year, 0.0/0.1/0.2 hospitalizations/year, 0.5/0.2/0.3 CT scans/year and 0.1/0.1/0.1 MRI/year.

CONCLUSIONS: Our results shows that number of neurologist visits, emergency admissions and hospitalizations seems to increase with number of prophylactic TFs, which highlights a higher healthcare need in more difficult-to-treat patients.