Lifting the burden of headache in China: managing migraine in a SMART way

With support from Lifting The Burden , a UK-registered charitable organization, a nationwide survey of headache disorders in the Chinese adult population was conducted in 2008–2009. This project, which was within the Global Campaign against Headache, showed that headache disorders have a major adverse impact on public health in China. Subsequently, as essential support for implementing headache services around the country, an enactment of stage 3 (intervention) of the Global Campaign against Headache − the continuing medical education (CME) program Headache Schools − was established. ‘SMART’ (Screen, Migraine, Aura, Red flag and Treatment), a systematic and operational disease management model, was introduced with the aims of enhancing neurologists’ knowledge of migraine, standardizing their diagnostic and treatment approaches, and improving their practices and outcomes. To date, 615 neurologists have been trained and 135 headache clinics have been established. In future, as we promote SMART in CME, we can use the database of our computerized clinical decision support systems to evaluate the impact on treatment outcomes.