Behavioral Issues Come to Children with Migraine

A new study in Cephalagia shows that children who have migraine headaches are much more likely than other children to also have behavioral difficulties, including social and attention issues, and anxiety and depression. This is no surprise to me. Marco Arruda, director of the Glia Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, together with Marcelo Bigal of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York studied 1,856 Brazilian children aged 5 to 11. The authors were studying how children’s behavioural and emotional symptoms correlate with migraine and tension-type headaches. Children who experience migraine had a much greater overall likelihood of abnormal behavioral scores than controls, especially in social, attention, somatic, anxiety-depressive, and internalizing domains. Children who experience tension-type headaches were affected in the same domains as migraine sufferers, but to a lesser degree. For children with either migraine (23%) or tension-type … Read more