Acute migraine treatment with rizatriptan in real world settings - focusing on treatment strategy, effectiveness, and behavior.

Although randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for assessing efficacy of a drug intervention, because they are conducted in a highly selected group of patients, they do not necessarily reflect normal customary or optimized patient care. Accordingly, information from RCTs must be supplemented by outcomes research and by nonexperimental or quasi-experimental study designs. Herein, we discuss information that supplements the rigorous but sometimes rigid nature of RCTs in an effort to better understand the clinical utility of drug treatment for migraine with patient-centered outcomes in mind. We start by discussing several lessons we learned from RCTs on comparative triptan studies, followed by presenting data on outcomes studies for rizatriptan. We then briefly discuss migraine treatment behavior issues, including early treatment and adherence to treatment.