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Case Reports
. 2019 Apr 3;20(3):118-121.
doi: 10.1002/jgf2.242. eCollection 2019 May.

Successful treatment of intractable menstrual migraine with the traditional herbal medicine tokishakuyakusan

Tetsuya Akaishi  1   2 , Shin Takayama  1   3 , Minoru Ohsawa  1   3 , Akiko Kikuchi  1   3 , Ryutaro Arita  1   3 , Ichiro Nakashima  4 , Masashi Aoki  2 , Tadashi Ishii  1   3
Affiliations
Case Reports

Successful treatment of intractable menstrual migraine with the traditional herbal medicine tokishakuyakusan

Tetsuya Akaishi et al. J Gen Fam Med. .

Abstract

In this report, we present the successful treatment of five consecutive cases of premenopausal women suffering from severe menstrual migraine with tokishakuyakusan (TSS). Two patients were complicated by tension-type headache (TTH), and another patient was by medication overuse headache (MOH). The effects of triptans were limited in all of them. After starting TSS, they showed dramatic improvement in the severity and frequency of their attacks. The patients with TTH and MOH also showed dramatic improvement in their symptoms. TSS could be a promising alternative choice for patients with intractable menstruation-related headaches that are refractory to conventional treatments, including triptans.

Keywords: herbal medicine; intractable headache; menstrual migraine; tokishakuyakusan; triptan.

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Conflict of interest statement

ST, MO, AK, and TI belong to the department of kampo medicine in Tohoku University Hospital, which receives grant from Tsumura and Co., Tokyo, Japan.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Strength of headache and the frequency of taking triptans in Case 2. An association between the headache and female hormones was apparent from the shown clinical course. NRS, numerical rating scale for pain; PIH, pregnancy‐induced hypertension; LEP, low‐dose estrogen‐progestin; TSS, tokishakuyakusan
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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