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Migraine Headaches Case Study

Decent Essays

Mayumi Oakland
7/11/16
CAT#1

Acupuncture treatment reduces frequency of episodic migraine headaches

Clinical bottom line: Prophylactic acupuncture treatment decreases episodes of migraine

Clinical Scenario: Your patient is a 40 year-old Caucasian female visiting the clinic for migraine headache. She doesn’t want to take medication whenever migraine happens and asks if there anything else she can do to prevent or reduce the occurrence of headache.

Search Process: PubMed was searched with key wards “acupuncture” and “migraine”. Filters used were clinical trial, meta-analysis, systematic reviews, and publication dates within 5 years.

Chosen Article: Linde, K, A. Gianni, B. Brinkhaus, Y. Fei, M. Mehring, E. a. Vertosick, A. Vickers, and A. R. White. 2016 Acupuncture for the prevention of episodic migraine. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 6:CD001218 …show more content…

The World Health Organization Clinical Trials Registry Platform and clinicaltrial.gov were used to search for ongoing or unpublished data. Total number of adult participants were 4985. Two reviewers performed data extraction and assessment of risk of bias and intervention quality. The disagreements were settled by discussion.
Strengths: The primary and secondary outcome measures were clearly defined and reasonable. Only RCTs were included in the study and were searched thoroughly. Unpublished trials were included. Inclusion criteria of at least 6 treatment sessions (once a week) was very specific. In addition, study only included participants who had headache more than 12 months. Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation was used to rate the study quality. Heterogeneity was assessed using Chi2 test and I2

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