What's the evidence for ergotamine drugs?

There is some evidence that drugs based on ergotamine can relieve migraine headaches.

One big summary of the evidence (known as a systematic review) showed that ergotamine drugs were better than dummy tablets (placebos) at helping people who had migraines.¹ Ergotamine made people's headaches less severe, reducing them from moderately or severely bad to mild. And ergotamine helped some people's headaches go away completely.

The review included seven studies known as randomised controlled trials (RCTs). But none of these studies used the definition of migraine drawn up by a group of experts called the International Headache Society. This makes their results less reliable since we do not know for sure if all the people in the studies actually had migraine attacks or some other type of headache.

Some studies suggest that people treated with triptan drugs tend to do better than those on ergotamine, although there is often only one comparitive study for each individual treatment.^{2 3 4 5}

Different trials comparing ergotamines with naproxen do not provide convincing evidence that one treatment is better than the other.^{6 7 8} There is also one small study suggesting that people with migraine who take aspirin as well as another treatment to prevent nausea and sickness, feel better than those taking ergotamine with caffeine. ⁹

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Read this information about the treatment in Clinical Evidence