Curelator Inc. Introduces Medication-Overuse Alert Feature for People with Migraine
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (PRWEB) June 27, 2018 -- Curelator Inc. is introducing a medication-overuse (MO) alert, a first-in-kind feature for a digital health platform.
Alec Mian PhD, the CEO and founder of Curelator explains:
“The medication-overuse alert is a critical capability requested by our clinician and headache center partners. This function has the potential to alert clinicians about patients who are at risk of unintentionally crossing an overuse threshold, which can make their migraines much worse. Historically, the recognition of this overuse threshold has been hard to identify for both clinicians and patients.”
Curelator developed the MO-alert system with Prof. Hans-Christoph Diener, MD PhD, one of the leading neurologists in clinical research of migraine and identification of the factors that lead to drug-induced headache.
Dr. Diener, formerly President of the German Neurological Society, President of the European Headache Federation (EHF), and the International Headache Society (IHS) and current chair of the German Headache Consortium and the German Stroke Data Bank, explains:
“The benefit of Curelator’s medication overuse alert is that it should allow early identification of migraine patients at risk for medication overuse, providing the opportunity for interventions to prevent those desperate for pain relief from unintentionally making their condition worse. This is a timely innovation given the current overuse of drugs in the U.S., such as opioids and barbiturates, that have been shown to have no effect on migraine.”
The MO function enables N1-Headache (formerly named Curelator Headache) to analytically process data entered by users for their medications, including prescription drugs such as opioids, as well as OTC analgesics and combinations of each. An alert will be issued when intake approaches the threshold of overuse established by the International Headache Society. To develop this feature, Curelator partnered with Pharmaceutical Press the publishing arm of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, to integrate one of the industry's most respected international drug databases: Martindale: The Complete Drug Reference™.
The MO alert is available exclusively to users enrolling with an N1-Headache Physician Program Code, a free subscription available to users through their physicians. Users subscribing through this program will receive a notice of the MO alert along with their clinicians. This program also offers clinicians the ability to monitor each patient’s Personal Analytical Report on a Curelator Clinician Dashboard to track headache data, medication usage and response, and factors associated with each individual’s migraine attacks.
A 2017 Curelator study (Cephalalgia 2017; Vol. 37(1S) 280–281) of medication overuse patterns with Peter Goadsby MD PhD, Professor of Neurology at King’s College in London and Stephen Silberstein MD, Director of the Headache Center at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, determined that about 20 percent of migraine patients were overusing acute headache medications in the UK, compared to almost 30 percent of migraine patients in the US.
About Curelator Inc.
N1-Headache is a unique digital platform that combines a simple smartphone data entry process with personalized N=1 analytics. The system generates individualized ‘trigger’, ‘protector’ and no association maps for each user after 90 days of data entry, incorporated within a Personal Analytical Report. The information featured in the Personal Report enable patients and their clinicians to manage risk factors, assess therapeutic response to drugs and facilitate prevention of medication overuse.
About Medication overuse and medication overuse headache (MOH)
From International Headache Society ICHD-3 guidelines (Cephalalgia 2018, Vol. 38(1) 1–211)
“Medication overuse headache occurs in patients with a pre-existing primary headache who, in association with medication overuse, develop a new type of headache or a significant worsening of their pre-existing headache. The diagnosis of Medication-overuse headache is extremely important clinically. Epidemiological evidence from many countries indicates that more than half of people with headache on 15 or more days/month have MOH. Clinical evidence shows that the majority of patients with this disorder improve after discontinuation of the overused medication, as does their responsiveness to preventative treatment. Simple advice on the causes and consequences of Medication-overuse headache is an essential part of its management and can be provided with success in primary care. An explanatory brochure is often all that is necessary to prevent or discontinue medication overuse. Prevention is especially important in patients prone to frequent headache.”
Sandy Bodner, Curelator Inc, http://www.curelator.com, +1 (617) 549-8523, [email protected]
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