40PBP EUROQOL (EQ-5D) HEALTH UTILITY SCORES FOR PATIENTS WITH MIGRAINE

Monday, October 19, 2009
Grand Ballroom, Salons 1 & 2 (Renaissance Hollywood Hotel)
Ruifeng Xu, PhD1, Ralph P. Insinga, PhD1, Henry Hu2, Wendy Golden3 and Min Huang, PHD4, (1)Merck Research Laboratories, North Wales, PA, (2)Merck Research Laboratories, West Point, PA, (3)Merck Research Laboratories, Whitehouse Station, NJ, (4)Merck & Co. Inc., North Wales, PA

Purposes: 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 health utilities among acute migraine patients experiencing different grades of headache severity.

Methods: 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 multi-center, double-blind study of a treatment for acute migraine in the United States.  The EuroQol (EQ-5D) system was used to measure generic health status at baseline and 24 hours 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 by Luo et al (2007) was applied. Confidence intervals were estimated by bootstrap methods.

Results: The study population was 88% female, 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).

Conclusions: The EuroQol (EQ-5D) instrument performed capably in distinguishing between different pain levels among acute migraine patients.  These data can be of value in informing cost-utility policy analyses of migraine interventions.

Candidate for the Lee B. Lusted Student Prize Competition