|
News from Cambridge Health Alliance
April 13, 2010
New Study Finds Uninsured Get Poor Migraine Care
Cambridge, MA…Migraines, often characterized by excruciating
headache and nausea, are much worse for the uninsured, according
to a new study.
Researchers at Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School
found that migraine sufferers with no insurance or who are insured
through Medicaid are less likely than people with private health
insurance to receive standard treatment. The study was published
in the April 13 issue of Neurology, the medical journal of
the American Academy of Neurology.
Migraine is common in the United States, afflicting about 18 percent
of women and six percent of men. With approximately 15 percent of
the U.S. population currently uninsured, the authors estimated that
5.5 million people are at risk of getting substandard care for their
headaches.
For the study, the authors analyzed 11 years of data on 6,138 individual
visits to doctors' offices, hospital outpatient departments, and
emergency departments for migraine. They determined that people
with no insurance or with Medicaid were twice as likely to receive
substandard migraine care as people with private health insurance.
Standard treatment was defined as use of a triptan or dihydroergotamine
(DHE) to stop a migraine plus use of one of a number of preventive
medications for people with migraines that are frequent or do not
respond to other medications.
"The tragedy is that we know how to treat this disabling condition,"
said study senior author Rachel Nardin, MD, chief of neurology at
Cambridge Health Alliance and an assistant professor of neurology
at Harvard Medical School. "But because they are uninsured
or inadequately insured, millions of Americans suffer needlessly."
The uninsured and those on Medicaid were also more likely to receive
their migraine care in the emergency department, where they were
much less likely to receive standard care than in a doctor's office
or hospital outpatient setting. They were nearly five times less
likely to receive standard acute treatment to stop a migraine and
nearly nine times less likely to receive standard treatment to prevent
migraine than in a doctor's office or outpatient setting.
The substandard treatment has significant financial implications,
as migraine sufferers lose an average of four to six days of work
annually, costing American employers up to $17 billion every year.
"Optimizing migraine care requires improvement in our health
care systems as well as better education for physicians in order
to prescribe the best available drug and behavioral treatments,"
concluded Dr. Nardin.
"The Impact of Insurance Status on Migraine Care in the United
States: A Population Based Study," Andrew P. Wilper, MD, MPH,
Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH, David U. Himmelstein, MD, and Rachel
Nardin, MD. Neurology, April 13, 2010.
|
|
|
