Children's Headache: The Difference Between Children's and Mothers' Perceptions and Awareness

Area of Science:

• Pediatric Neurology
• Headache Medicine
• Child Psychology

Background:

• Assessing headache history in children is challenging due to age and reliance on parental reports, potentially causing symptom under/over-reporting.
• The ID Migraine questionnaire was used to evaluate headache presence in children and correlate their responses with maternal reports.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the utility of the ID Migraine questionnaire in a pediatric population.
• To examine discrepancies between children's and mothers' reports of headaches in children aged 10-12 years.
• To assess the prevalence of headache and potential migraine criteria in this age group.

Main Methods:

• A cohort of 68 children (aged 10-12 years) and their mothers completed the ID Migraine questionnaire separately.
• The questionnaire included specific questions regarding the child's headache history within the past three months.
• Data were analyzed to identify headache prevalence, migraine criteria fulfillment, and agreement between child and mother responses.

Main Results:

• 35.3% of children reported headache episodes in the last three months, with higher prevalence in females (45.7%) than males (24.2%).
• Only 2.95% met two migraine criteria, and 16.1% met at least one criterion; 11 children reported headaches without meeting criteria.
• Discrepancies between child and mother reports occurred in 33.8% of cases, with ~61% disagreeing on headache occurrence and ~49% on ID Migraine items.

Conclusions:

• Collecting headache data in children under 12 presents significant challenges, particularly regarding report concordance.
• A substantial percentage of conflicting reports involved underreporting by one party, highlighting potential data inaccuracies.
• The observed incidence of migraine in this pediatric sample was lower than typically reported in existing literature.