The study, led by Dr. Pengfei Zhang, Assistant Professor of Neurology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, analyzed medications linked with headaches using the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS). The researchers looked through FAERS entries from July 2018 through March 2020 to find which medications were most commonly linked with headache. They calculated a reporting odds ratio (ROR) to determine the likelihood of a drug causing a specific side effect, in this case, headache. The 30 most frequently appearing medications were then ranked by their ROR values.
The study identified the most common types of medications linked with headache, sorted by drug type. The top 10 medications linked with headache are:
1. Tofacitinib (Xeljanz) – Arthritis and autoimmune diseases
2. Hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) – Arthritis and autoimmune diseases
3. Erenumab (Aimovig) – Migraine
4. Infliximab (Remicade, Inflectra, Renflexis) – Arthritis and autoimmune diseases
5. Rituximab (Rituxan, MabThera) – Arthritis and autoimmune diseases
6. Certolizumab (Cimzia) – Arthritis and autoimmune diseases
7. Pregabalin (Lyrica) – Nerve pain, fibromyalgia, and epilepsy
8. Adalimumab (Humira, Amjevita, Hyrimoz) – Arthritis and autoimmune diseases
9. Etanercept (Enbrel) – Arthritis and autoimmune diseases
10. Secukinumab (Cosentyx) – Arthritis and autoimmune diseases