Efficacy of Migraine Surgery
The Evidence
There is now a vast number of published studies about the safety and efficacy of migraine surgery. So much so that the American Society of Plastic Surgeons released a policy statement in 2018 testifying to the effectiveness of these operations in reducing migraine headache symptoms and frequency, and even complete elimination of headache pain. They now consider migraine surgery “a standard, accepted treatment”.
If we take a look at a large 2016 study of 270 patients undergoing migraine surgery, 84% of patients reported an at least 50% reduction in migraine days per month, while 57% of patients experienced complete elimination of their headaches. These rates of improvement are fairly typical of other published migraine surgery studies.
Link to study – In depth review of symptom triggers
In 2022, a group of researchers based in Canada and the USA performed a study called a meta-analysis, which is a type of study that pools the results from multiple studies on the same topic – in this case, migraine surgery – to get a clearer and more reliable answer than any single study can provide on its own. This meta-analysis included a total of 68 studies on migraine surgery and was published in a journal called the Annals of Surgery.
Link to study – Efficacy and safety of migraine surgery
The link below is a table that has been taken from that meta-analysis. The column on the left shows the authors and year of publication of the original studies, the middle column shows the percentage of patients who reported complete elimination of their migraines in those studies, while the column on the right shows the percentage of patients who reported an overall improvement in their migraines after surgery.
To answer the question, “how successful is migraine surgery?”, we can use this table to get a ballpark figure for success rates from migraine surgery from all the available published evidence. If we take the average of the figures in the middle and right-hand columns, we can conclude that across these multiple studies, about 40% of patients who had migraine surgery experienced elimination of their migraines, while about 85% of patients experienced an overall improvement.
