The effectiveness of ibuprofen and lorazepam combination therapy in treating the symptoms of acute Migraine

A randomized clinical trial

Abstract

Background: Migraine is a common, episodic and debilitating disease. The migraineur not only suffers from pain, but also lives with a diminished to poor quality of life. Several medicinal therapies are used to abate the debilitating symptoms of this disease. 

Objective: The present study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of Ibuprofen and Lorazepam combination therapy in treating the symptoms of acute migraine.

Methods: The present randomized clinical trial study used the pretest-posttest design with three comparison treatments, to examine 90 patients with an average of two to six attacks per month and an initial diagnosis of migraine based on the International Headache Society (HIS) criteria. The study was conducted on patients during the first half of 2014 with a diagnosis of acute migraine attack who were referred to Babol Ayatollah Rouhani Hospital in Iran. The patients were randomly divided into three groups of 30. The first group was administered 200 mg Ibuprofen capsules, the second group 400 mg Ibuprofen capsules and the third group a combination of 200 mg Ibuprofen capsules and 1 mg Lorazepam tablets. The medications were taken in the presence of the researcher. A checklist was used to assess the severity of headache and other migraine symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, photophobia and phonophobia in the patients, before and two hours after the intervention. Data were analyzed in SPSS-18 using the Mann-Whitney test, the McNemar test, Wilcoxon’s test, the NOVA and the Chi-squared test at the significance level of p<0.05, and power analysis with 30 patients in each group to perform this study was 0.8(1-β).

Results: The mean age of participants was reported as 52±8 years and the condition was more frequent in women (56%). All three treatment regimens reduced the severity of headache significantly in the patients (p<0.001); nevertheless, the combination therapy used, produced the lowest mean severity of headache (p<0.001). The highest reduction in nausea and vomiting was (3.3%). None of the patients in either of the three groups reported phonophobia after the intervention, but only the patients in the combination therapy group reported no instance of photophobia. 

Conclusions: Given the greater effectiveness of combination therapy with Ibuprofen and Lorazepam in alleviating the symptoms of acute migraine compared to single-drug treatments with Ibuprofen, Lorazepam is recommended to be used as a first line treatment for acute migraine. 

Clinical trial registration: The trial was registered at the Thai Clinical Trials Registry (TCTR) (http://www.clinicaltrials.in.th/) with the ID: TCTR20160927003.

Funding: The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.