OBJECTIVES: To quantify patients receiving preventive treatments in episodic (EM) and chronic migraine (CM) context when managed by general practitioners (GPs) in Italy.

METHODS: Retrospective analysis on Real World Data from IQVIA Italian Longitudinal Patient Database. All patients with at least one prescription of migraine preventive treatments from June 2016 to May 2017 were considered. For each patient, the date of the most recent preventive prescription was considered as the Index Date. Based on treatments during the two years preceding the Index Date, patients were categorized according to their line of preventive treatment. The number of migraine attacks was estimated based on the number of triptans and indometacin/caffeine/prochlorperazine fixed combination pills prescribed during the six-month period following the Index Date. Patients were then categorized as experiencing EM or CM adopting 84 migraine attacks over a six-month period as a cut-off. A stratification of patients based on preventive line and attacks number was given.

RESULTS: We found 1,667 patients receiving migraine preventive treatments during the study period; 1,397 (84%) were at their first line of treatment: 436 (31%) were new, as they did not have previous preventive prescriptions, while 961 (69%) had already received previous prescriptions of the same preventive treatment prescribed at the Index Date. Patients with previous prescriptions of preventive treatments different from the one at the Index Date (i.e. at least one treatment failure) were 270 (16%). Most of the patients receiving preventive treatments were identified as having EM (97%), while those with CM represented 3% of the total.

CONCLUSIONS: These results are consistent with the literature, suggesting real world data as a valid source to describe migraine patients when managed by GPs. On the other hand, further studies involving specialists would be needed to achieve a complete overview on the pathology and its management.