A drug used to treat acute migraine seems to prevent some of the migraines women experience around the time of menstruation, researchers announced Monday. Previous research has shown that women who suffer migraines are twice as likely to have one during the first 2 days of their period than during the rest of the month. These so-called “menstrual migraines” - which can develop between two days before and four days after the onset of menses - often last longer, are harder to treat and more likely to recur than other types of migraine. Many times, menstrual migraines are treated with newer birth control pills that reduce women’s periods to 3 to 4 times per year, or with over-the-counter migraine medicines, which need to be taken several times per day, study author Dr. Stephen A. Silberstein told Reuters Health. Now, he and his colleagues have found that women who started taking one of the newer “triptan” drugs, frovatriptan, a few days before they would typically get a menstrual migraine got fewer migraines during their periods. And for people who did get migraines, they were less severe and didn’t last as long, according to the team’s report in the journal Neurology.
