Patients educate patients to control migraine

When migraine patients trained other migraine patients how to prevent migraine headaches, attacks declined and both trainers and trainees gained a greater sense of control over their attacks, researchers report.

Patient-trainers provide credible and recognizable disease-specific knowledge, Dr. Jan Passchier told Reuters Health. "Trainees appreciated the trainers' emotional and motivational assistance."

Moreover, trainers themselves benefited "in terms of large headache improvements and improved quality of life," noted Passchier, of Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Passchier and colleagues evaluated the effects of migraine sufferers providing other migraine sufferers with home-based behavior training. Both trainers and trainees were under medical care for relatively frequent migraine (1 to 6 times per month), with or without aura, but had no underlying associated disease, the investigators explain in the journal Cephalalgia.

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