Flunarizine, a new preventive approach to migraine. A double-blind comparison with placebo

Abstract

Seventeen patients with common or classic migraine were prophylactically treated with 10 mg flunarizine daily, whereas 18 patients received a placebo during a 12-week randomized double-blind study. In the gross flunarizine was significantly superior to the placebo. Only 3 patients felt that flunarizine had been useless and the investigator also guessed the medication code correctly in all but these 3 cases. After a 1-month starting period the difference between flunarizine and placebo in reducing the frequency of the migraine attacks became statistically significant in favour of flunarizine. The mean monthly number of attacks was respectively 3.3 and 3.8 before the study and 1.4 and 3.2 during the study. The limited scale of the trial precluded a judgment as to whether one type of migraine would respond better to flunarizine than the other. Side-effects were negligible, weight gain being secondary to the therapeutic effect rather than an untoward consequence of treatment.