Non-invasive neuromodulation clinical trials in acute migraine treatments
| Device type* | Studies (n) | Enrolled population (total n) | Both aura and no aura patients included (%) | Blinded studies (n)† | Sham-controlled studies (n) | Percentage of studies evaluating IHS-recommended endpoints | |
| Primary (%)‡ | Secondary (%)‡ | ||||||
| Electrical nerve stimulation | |||||||
| Non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation (nVNS) | 4 | 396 | 100 | 2 | 2 | 100 | 100 |
| External trigeminal nerve stimulation (e-TNS) | 3 | 196 | 100 | 1 | 1 | 33 | 100 |
| Occipital and supraorbital transcutaneous nerve stimulation (OS-TNS) | 3 | 106 | 100 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 100 |
| Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) | 1 | 32 | 100 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Transcranial alternating current stimulation | 1 | 40 | 100 | 1 | 1 | 100 | 0 |
| Auricular transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation | 1 | 50 | 100 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Magnetic stimulation | |||||||
| Single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (sTMS) | 2 | 309 | 50 | 2 | 1 | 50 | 50 |
| Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) | 1 | 201 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 100 | 100 |
| Other | |||||||
| Conditioned pain modulation (CPM) | 3 | 476 | 100 | 3 | 3 | 0 | 33 |
| Intranasal kinetic oscillation stimulation | 1 | 36 | 100 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
*All references for studies in this table are listed in the online supplementary references.
†Double-blind or better.
‡Percentage of efficacy studies in which either a primary or a secondary endpoint recommended by the International Headache Society was used. Safety studies were excluded from this calculation.
IHS, International Headache Society.