The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved Aimovig for the preventive treatment of migraine in adults. The treatment is given by once-monthly self-injections. Aimovig is the first FDA-approved preventive migraine treatment in a new class of drugs that work by blocking the activity of calcitonin gene-related peptide, a molecule that is involved in migraine attacks.
Read the full press release here.
About Headaches
It is estimated that over 45 million people in the United States suffer from acute or chronic headaches,[1] with headaches accounting for one emergency room visit every 10 seconds. 18% of women and 8% of men between the ages of 18 and 55 suffer from what is technically defined as a migraine by the medical community. It is believed if those criteria are slightly relaxed, the number of individuals suffering from debilitating headaches is far greater. Headaches are the number two cause of disability in the United States, and headaches are one of the top causes for the loss of workplace productivity. Because the medical community has not yet fully embraced “headache” as a medical condition, it is believed that many headache sufferers remain undiagnosed.
1. See migraineinformation.org for more information on this statistic.