Almotriptan: meeting today's needs in acute migraine treatment.

Migraine is a common disorder associated with considerable individual and economic burden. Triptans are recommended for the treatment of migraine of any severity in patients who have failed to gain adequate relief with nonspecific medication; early transition to triptans avoids prolonged morbidity in patients failing to respond to nonspecific medications. There is evidence that early intervention therapy with oral formulations in migraine, soon after the onset of an attack and when pain is still mild, improves efficacy. Seven different triptans are currently marketed, with differing pharmacologic, efficacy and tolerability profiles. Almotriptan has many positive features, which include rigorously demonstrated efficacy in sumatriptan nonresponders, as early therapy and in menstrual migraine. In addition, almotriptan has a favorable pharmacologic profile with a lack of clinically relevant pharmacokinetic interventions with other drugs, adverse reactions rate similar to placebo, superior cost-effectiveness and excellent performance on composite clinical outcome measures that incorporate features of greatest importance to patients. Although effective in both triptan-naive and -experienced patients, and as both early and standard therapy, almotriptan shows greater efficacy in triptan-naive patients and as early treatment, and is consistently one of the preferred triptans in multiattribute decision-making analyses incorporating attributes of significance for patients and physicians. Therefore, almotriptan has many features that make it an ideal choice for a triptan-naive patient moving from nonspecific medication, a patient switching from another triptan owing to inefficacy or tolerability issues and patients being advised to take a triptan early in the course of a migraine attack.