Efficacy and Safety of Fremanezumab Further Displayed: Stephanie J. Nahas, MD

"This is important because we have theoretical concerns about antagonizing a system that is in-part responsible for vasoreactivity and cardiovascular autoregulation. If you interfere with that, could you, in theory, be putting someone at risk for a cardiovascular event? You could.”

At the 2021 American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Annual Meeting, April 17-22, an abstract evaluated the cardiovascular (CV) safety of fremanezumab in patients with migraine and a CV medical history while another looked at the efficacy of fremanezumab in participants with moderate and higher frequency episodic migraine. The first was a pooled analysis from 3 phase 3 trials and resulted in fremanezumab demonstrating a favorable CV safety profile in participants with CV medical history or with 2 or more CV risk factors.

The other study further examined fremanezumab’s efficacy. Based on reductions in monthly migraine days and monthly headache days versus placebo, the treatment showed similar therapeutic gains among patients with moderate-frequency episodic migraine and high-frequency episodic migraine. Stephanie J. Nahas, MD, an associate professor and director of the Headache Medicine Fellowship Program at Thomas Jefferson University, feels as though this data only bolsters the overall profile for the migraine treatment.

In an interview with NeurologyLive, she provided background on some of the major findings from both studies, as well as the clinical significance behind the findings. The data add to the available literature of the agent, which was approved for migraine prevention in September 2018