Childhood migraines

Pediatrician Wendy Mitchell, MD, shares advice for parents on migraines in children, including the symptoms of childhood migraines, their causes, and potential treatments
Childhood Migraines - Symptoms, Causes, And Treatments
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Childhood migraines

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Migraines are a type of headaches. They can happen at any age. They're probably a bit more common in adults than children, but they're actually quite common in children. In fact, migraines occur in as many as 1 in 4 people overall. Probably as many as 1 in 10 children. So what makes it a migraine as opposed to just an ordinary headache? There are several factors that make a neurologist classify it as a migraine, and actually severity is not necessarily the most important part of it. So specific characteristics that make it a migraine are it's lasting at least several hours. it's often on one side of the head. It's generally pounding. It may be accompanied by neurologic changes at the beginning such as numbness, tingling, changes in vision, slurred speech. On rare occasions, it can be accompanied by even more alarming neurologic symptom such as confusion, weakness, or loss of function in an extremity. Those are much less common. And they're commonly associated with nausea and vomiting. They're commonly relieved by sleep. And they're commonly associated with being bothered by light and sound, or what we call phonophobia and photophobia. Now, most people don't have all of those. They only have some of those. And in general, even people who clearly have migraines may not have all the features with all the headaches. So they may have nausea and vomiting with some of the headaches but not with all of the headaches. Now many people can pick out a specific provoking factor, particularly teenage girls and women who have migraines with their menstrual periods, but you can have migraines all the way back to essentially infancy.

Pediatrician Wendy Mitchell, MD, shares advice for parents on migraines in children, including the symptoms of childhood migraines, their causes, and potential treatments

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Wendy Mitchell, MD

Pediatrician, Neurology, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles

Wendy Mitchell, MD, is Professor of Clinical Neurology, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California. She is acting Division Head of Neurology at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, where she has practiced for over 30 years. She is a native of Los Angeles. Her current research interests include cognitive and behavioral aspects of childhood epilepsy, clinical research in anticonvulsants, and a rare immune-mediated syndrome, opsoclonus-myoclonus (or dancing eyes syndrome). In her free time she enjoys scuba diving and yoga.

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