Behavioral and emotional symptoms and primary headaches in children – A population-based study
From Cephalagia
Kids who get migraine headaches are much more likely than other children to also have behavioral difficulties, including social and attention issues, and anxiety and depression. The more frequent the headaches, the greater the effect. For this study the authors studied 1,856 Brazilian children aged 5 to 11. They say that this is the first large, community based study of its kind to look at how children’s behavioural and emotional symptoms correlate with migraine and tension-type headaches (TTH), and to incorporate data on headache frequency. The study used internationally validated headache questionnaires as well as the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) to assess emotional symptoms. Until now, few studies have examined the contrasts between TTH in children and observed headache frequency. “As previously reported by others, we found that migraine was associated with social problems, the ‘social’ domain identifies difficulties in social engagement as well as infantilized behavior for the age and this may be associated with important impact on the personal and social life.” commented Arruda, one of the authors “Providers should be aware of this possibility in children with migraines, in order to properly address the problem.”
