AAN 2025 | Addressing health equity in headache disorders
Muhammad Yousaf, MD, Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, Roanoke, VA, comments on the importance of addressing health equity in the field of headache disorders. Dr Yousaf highlights that disparities in access to care and socioeconomic factors contribute to unequal outcomes among patients with headache. He discusses initiatives to increase awareness and provide resources for underrepresented populations to address these issues. This interview took place at the 77th American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA.
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Transcript
So when the word health equity comes in, for me it’s that all the resources should be used for everybody, despite the color, ethnicity, where they are, rural, urban population. And that should be the goal for every physician striving or practicing not only headache medicine, medicine in general. When it comes to headache medicine, obviously we have different drugs, including triptans and now gepants and anti-CGRPs...
So when the word health equity comes in, for me it’s that all the resources should be used for everybody, despite the color, ethnicity, where they are, rural, urban population. And that should be the goal for every physician striving or practicing not only headache medicine, medicine in general. When it comes to headache medicine, obviously we have different drugs, including triptans and now gepants and anti-CGRPs. But there’s still scarcity of data when it comes to the newer drugs. There’s still that point that we are not using them for everybody. And that’s because of the cost. That’s also because we don’t have enough data when it comes to different populations. So our goal should be that we are treating the patients with evidence-based medicine, but we are also giving them the resources that should be equitable for everybody at the same time. We do Headache on the Hill every year by AHDA. We go over there and we try to advocate for our patients for the Safe Step Act, NIH funding and also for the VA Center of Headache Excellence. And at the same time we are also trying our best that headache in women, that is a topic that needs to be more talked about because in pregnancy, lactation, it’s a challenge and we need more resources and we need more trials to look at the medications which can be used or which cannot be used. Obviously we can’t use medications in pregnancy but we can always do research about these medications and that’s what for me is the goal to have those resources for everybody and available at every time.
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