The Quality of Conventional and Alternative Medicine Randomized Controlled Trials in Headache Treatment

Principal Investigators: Mylene Huynh, MD, Wayne B. Jonas, MD, Cindy C. Crawford, BA, Alyson Kepple, Gary Kaplan, DO

Affiliations: Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Samueli Institute for Information Biology and Family Practice Associates

Background: Chronic headache is one of the most common conditions for which people seek medical care, either with conventional medicine or, increasingly with complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies.  CAM therapies are often not compared directly with conventional therapies in clinical trials.  Physicians have to evaluate different study results in order to decide on the best therapeutic option for their patients.  Furthermore, the quality of CAM studies is often questioned:  Do they meet the scientific rigor of conventional studies?

Objective of the study: To examine the quality of available research evidence on prophylactic treatment of headache to offer insight into the quality of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on headache treatment, and to compare the quality of RCTs between conventional and CAM studies..

Methods and Design: Published randomized controlled clinical trials on the prophylactic treatment of primary headache between the years 1979 to 2004 were collected and systematically evaluated for the scientific quality using pre-defined methodological criteria..