New Headache Study Results Reported from Stanford University (The State of Insurance Coverage of Calcitonin Gene-related Peptide-targeted Medications and Its Impact On the Implementation of the American Headache Society’s 2024 Consensus …): Nervous System Diseases and Conditions – Headache

2025 AUG 26 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Investigators publish new report on Nervous System Diseases and Conditions - Headache. According to news reporting originating from Palo Alto, California, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “To determine if insurers updated formularies and step therapy requirements after the American Headache Society’s (AHS) March 2024 consensus statement for the prevention of migraine that changed calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP)-targeted medications to first-line treatments, and if there was an associated expansion in patients prescribed these medications. Insurance company formularies and step therapy requirements should ideally mirror the recommendations provided by the AHS.”

Our news editors obtained a quote from the research from Stanford University, “The AHS’ March 2024 consensus statement for medications for the prevention of migraine made CGRP-targeted medications first-line treatments, removing the recommendation for first pursuing two 8-week trials of non-specific oral medications. We conducted a retrospective study using the Epic Cosmos electronic health record database, insurance formulary, and step therapy information. The Epic Cosmos research platform was queried for patients with migraine and prescriptions for the CGRP-targeted medications by month from May 1, 2023, to January 31, 2025. Our primary outcomes were the time-trend in the prescription of the CGRP-targeted therapies during the study interval and whether there was an immediate increase in patients using CGRP-targeted medications or change in the rate of utilization after the March 2024 AHS consensus statement. Secondary outcomes included this analysis for patients with chronic migraine, based on care setting, and with the post-release period broken into early and late phases. Insurance formularies and step therapy requirements were reviewed for coverage of the CGRP-targeted medications. Our study included 6,898,995 patients with migraine and 929,793 patients with chronic migraine. During the study period, prescriptions for all CGRP-targeted preventive medications by all providers showed statistically significant increases, excluding erenumab, which was unchanged. For none of the queried CGRP-targeted medications in the main analysis, was the AHS consensus statement’s release linked to an increase in their usage. Conversely, for patients with chronic migraine, in the non-neurology setting, a small immediate increase was seen for fremanezumab, erenumab, and atogepant, but this was offset by a subsequent slowing of the overall rate of increase in their utilization in this setting (-0.07 percentage point change in rate of uptake for any CGRP-targeted medication by month; 95% confidence interval, -0.10 to -0.04, p< 0.001). Although insurance coverage for at least one of the CGRP-targeted medications was high (142 of 149 plans, 95.3%), individual medication coverage varied with 126 of 149 (84.6%) of plans covering galcanezumab but only 93 of 149 (62.4%) covering atogepant. Step therapy requirements including trials of non-specific oral medications before starting CGRP-targeted therapies were largely in place 10 months after the consensus statement release. Ten months after the American Headache Society’s March 2024 consensus statement made the CGRP-targeted medications first-line for the prevention of migraine, insurance companies have had incomplete compliance with the recommendations, potentially limiting the full impact of the AHS’ consensus statement on the utilization of the CGRP-targeted therapies. Plain Language Summary In March 2024, the American Headache Society released a new consensus statement for medications to prevent migraine to make the calcitonin gene-related peptide-targeted medications first-line. In this study, we wanted to see if this change increased the number of patients using these medications, and we found that the consensus statement was not linked to an overall change in the number of patients using these medications after 10 months; however, small one-time increases were seen in patients with chronic migraine who were not seen by neurologists.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “This is likely because insurance companies are not covering the medications enough to reflect best practices in migraine prevention as recommended by the American Headache Society.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: The State of Insurance Coverage of Calcitonin Gene-related Peptide-targeted Medications and Its Impact On the Implementation of the American Headache Society’s 2024 Consensus Statement: an Interrupted Time-series Analysis. Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain, 2025. Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain can be contacted at: Wiley, 111 River St, Hoboken 07030-5774, NJ, USA.

The news editors report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Leon S. Moskatel, Stanford University, Dept. of Neurology, Palo Alto, CA, United States.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1111/head.15027. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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