Migraine

Hi,I just discoverd this forum a few weeks ago. My son has had mirgraines for 3 years now. He's 8 now. He was on Periactin for a year or so and did well on it for a while. it has stopped being effective, so we've moved on to Topamax. It's been over 2months, but I think it's finally starting to help.
My question is about pain relief. When he has a medium - bad migraine, nothing seems to help. Advil is the neuros order, but doesn't seem to help if it's gonna be a bad one. He has imitrex now, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Today he had a medium, I gave advil and imitrex early, but after 3 hours he was still fighting it, so I gave him a tylenol too. Worked like a charm!
I was just wondering if both meds (advil and tylenol) together are OK to do and if there is anything else out there that could help.

Thanks for your help, I'll post more about us later when I've got more time!!!
Heather

This is really a question for your son's doctor, who knows what other meds he's taking and his medical background. He might decide it's okay, since the Advil and Tylenol have different key ingredients, and you've allowed a few hours in between them. Or he might caution against it, since it's kind of exhausting your options all at once. To avoid rebound, you want to limit meds to ideally twice a week, and if you've used up all your arsenal in the first couple of days of what turns out to be a bad week as it drags on, then you're severely limiting your options as you go by doubling up on meds. You'd also be courting rebound.

I know it's harder to treat kids than adults with migraine, because the options are more limited both med-wise and dose-wise. But to be honest with you, even though I'm a grown-up with a few more options at my disposal, I tend to do what you can do for kids, and that's this: rather than throwing a different med at it, I resort to comfort measures. For me, it's usually ice. It can also mean sleep. Sleep is the ULTIMATE migraine abortive. These kind of things don't encourage the rebound monster, don't involve maxing out of treatment options, and are cheap and side-effect free. And they can help a lot. We've got a thread here about comfort measures, called What's in Your Toolbox?, and even though it's things we grownups do, you might well find some things there that will give you ideas on how to help comfort your son without adding more meds to the mix.

Bottom line about the meds? Ask his doctor what he's comfortable with.

Hi there my 7 year old son suffers extreme pain at times related to migraine. After years of trying OTC drugs with little sucess we finally got a referral to a Pediactric pain management clinic. This took lots of tears and tantrums on my behalf. The clinic was run though a childrens hospital and they have been fantastic. My best advice would be to push for something like this. Jump up and down if you have because kids should not suffer for so long.

We were given a building plan of pain management which involves both paracetamol and ibuprofen given together first up. If the pain persists we then give oxycodone. (Sorry we are in Australia so all the drugs have different names here). We have a 24/7 case manager we can access when we have any further questions and if needs be he will be admitted to hospital for IV pain relief.

We record all the drugs we give him and when and this is reviewed by a pain specialist every 3 months. My son has just gone through another rough patch and the hospital rang every day to check that the medications and doses we were giving were appropriate and to evaluate if he needed to be admitted.

Our primary care DR is also involved and regularly updated by the hospital.

This has taken all the worry out of everything for us. Like Droolie said there is the risk of rebound headache and other complications so please see a Dr and if that one does not help find another.

We also keep a diary which has helped the Dr get a picture of just how bad and frequent the pain has been. It was the first step on the road to pain managment.

Wishing you all the best with it and let us know how you get on. It just breaks your heart having to watch them suffer.

Daisy

Heather,

I know its not comforting to hear but once my son's migraines pass the mild stage (first 10 minutes) if not relieved by Advil/Motrin (our neuro added cocacola for the caffeine and cola syrup to settle his stomach) the only thing that seems to work is sleep.