Good news for people with migraine who take drugs before or during pregnancy: Study
There's good news for people with migraine who take common drugs before or during pregnancy-a new study found no increase in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and ADHD in their children. The study, which looked at drugs used for migraine attacks called triptans, is published on May 21, 2025, online in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
The study does not prove that there is a link between these drugs and neurodevelopment disorders.
“These results are encouraging for people with migraine, who may be taking these drugs before they even know that they are pregnant, and this is helpful information for their physicians, who can make more informed decisions about treating people with debilitating migraine attacks,” said study author Hedvig Nordeng, PhD, of the University of Oslo in Norway.
For the study, researchers used health registry records for the entire Norwegian population and identified 26,210 pregnancies in female participants with migraine at the start of pregnancy. Of those, 21,281 people, or over 80%, had taken triptans in the year before they became pregnant and 4,929 of those with migraine had not taken any triptans during that time. For those who took the drugs, researchers divided them into four groups: people who had low use of triptans and stopped using them before pregnancy (42%); people who increased using triptans six months before pregnancy and stopped using them in early pregnancy (31%); people who had moderate triptan use before pregnancy and continued into early pregnancy (21%); and people who used triptans before and during pregnancy (6%).
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