Background

What do we already know about this topic?

Headaches are a common presenting complaint of children seen in the pediatric emergency department (ED).¹
The goal of headache treatment is fast, effective relief of pain with minimal side effects.
Children commonly respond to oral analgesics, such as ibuprofen, and triptan therapies.
In adults, optimal efficacy of triptans are associated with early use (within an hour of headache onset), but pediatric patients often present after their headaches have persisted for hours, if not days, and home treatments have failed.^1-3
Triptans are not commonly used for children in the ED and there is a lack of pediatric studies on their use in an ED setting.
Intranasal sumatriptan has the potential to be an effective first-line treatment in pediatric patients in the ED.

A retrospective study of electronic medical records of all children six years and older diagnosed with migraine or headache treated according to the Seattle Childrens Hospital Clinical Standard Work Migraine Pathway from 2016 to 2020.
Collected data includes patient demographics, pain scores throughout the visit, medications and times they were given, disposition and readmission to the ED.
Analyses includes descriptive statistics and adjusted linear regressions to quantify correlations between pain scores and interventions.