Self Help

Children with migraines often exhibit many of the same personality traits as adult sufferers, including anxiety, tension, and perfectionism. They also seem vulnerable to the same factors of diet, hunger, fatigue, and a change in routine that trigger adult migraines. Similarly, stressful or exciting events frequently set off a migraine attack in a susceptible teenager. Up until adolescence, boys and girls get migraine with same amount of frequency.

Tension-type headaches are not as common but do occur among children. As with adult tension headaches, the pain surrounds the head or forms a band around it and may involve neck tenderness and muscle spasms. And just like adults, kids that tend to react more strongly to stress in family or school situations, secrete more of the same adrenal hormones that are believed to initiate tension headaches. Reducing or eliminating emotional stress may be all that is needed to bring the headache problem under control in our kids.

Kids and teens feel pain as strongly as adults. When a headache strikes, they feel the same pounding head pain, nausea, vomiting, and aversion to light and sound that adults endure. Although a wide range of physical factors including fever, eye-strain, motion sickness, ear infections, measles and mumps can trigger headaches, hormones play a central role as well.

The hormonal basis for migraine in children is thought to be much the same as in adults, involving the neurotransmitter hormones serotonin, adrenaline, and noradrenaline. But the symptoms of headache in children may be very different from those found in adults.

In childhood migraine, the aura phase may be characterized by dramatic neurological manifestations including confusion, listlessness, painful sensitivity to light, fever, hallucinations, dilated pupils, or difficulty speaking.

In one form of childhood migraine known as basilar artery migraine, children may experience weakness or numbness on both sides of the body, vision problems, temporary balance problems, or dizziness during the aura phase. In basilar artery migraine, the blood vessels that feed the brain from the back of the neck and head can be constricted. The back of the brain is where the balance mechanisms are present.

However, during the “headache” phase of an attack children with migraine may not experience head pain at all. Although they may suffer severe abdominal pain instead. Doctors call this phenomenon “abdominal migraine” or “migraine equivalent,” and it may be compounded by motion sickness or recurrent bouts of nausea and vomiting that can last for several days.

Abdominal migraine often develops into a more typical migraine headache pattern later in life. It is thought that colic found in some children may be early migraine symptoms. Migraine equivalents other than abdominal pain include sudden mood changes, dizziness, blurred vision, unexplained fatigue, food cravings, nausea, or loss of appetite.

These symptoms may be explained partially by the fact that serotonin acts as both a neurotransmitter and a hormone. In this dual role it mediates many different body functions. When serotonin is initially released and then flushed from the body during the biochemical dysfunction that causes headache, a variety of other body functions may go wrong as well.