Headaches are very common in children. By the time they reach 18, essentially all kids will have had at least one. Most children get them rarely, usually with an illness. But some children get recurrent headaches. About 5% of kindergartners experience this problem, and the percentage goes up as children get older. By the time they get to the end of high school, that number is up to more than 25%.
Recurrent headaches often run in families. There are two types: primary and secondary. Primary headaches come from the nervous system itself, while secondary headaches are caused by something affecting the nervous system, such as an illness.
Migraines and tension headaches
Migraine and tension headaches are the two most common primary headaches in children.
- Migraines cause pain that a child can point to, usually on both sides of the head. It is throbbing and gets worse with activity. Light and noise can make it worse, and children will sometimes have nausea or vomiting. About 10% of children also have an “aura,” meaning that before the headache they have changes in their vision, like blind spots or sparkling lights, or other things like weakness or tingling.
- Tension headaches tend to be all over and less easy to point to. They don’t throb like migraines or get worse with activity. As with migraines, light and noise can make them worse. However, they don’t cause nausea or vomiting, and there isn’t an aura.
What causes secondary headaches?
The most common cause of secondary headaches is illness, like a bad cold or the flu. Other common causes include bumps to the head (from a little knock to a concussion) and side effects of medicines. Kids can also get headaches from taking over-the-counter pain medications too often — more than three or so times a week — which many parents don’t realize. There are more serious causes of secondary headaches, like high blood pressure, tumors, or increased pressure on or bleeding in the brain, but those are very rare.
What should you do about recurrent headaches?
If your child is having recurrent headaches, call your doctor. Even though it’s likely to be nothing serious, your doctor should know about it. Keep a diary of the headaches: what they are like, any symptoms that happened at the same time, the medicines you gave, and what was going on that day. This will help you and your doctor figure out what to do.
Acetaminophen and ibuprofen can help in the moment, but don’t immediately reach for medicine unless your child is very uncomfortable. Not only can giving pain relievers too frequently make things worse, but much of the time medicine isn’t needed. Have your child rest, perhaps with a cool cloth over their eyes. Get them something to drink (water is fine) and something light to eat if they haven’t eaten in a while.
Preventing recurrent headaches
To help prevent recurrent headaches, make sure your child
- gets enough sleep (eight to 10 hours a night)
- gets daily exercise
- eats and drinks regularly throughout the day.
Stress can cause headaches, so be mindful of your child’s stress level. Keep lines of communication open, and make sure that your child has downtime every day to relax and do whatever makes them happy.
To learn about when headaches in children can be a sign of a problem, check out 8 things to watch for when your child has a headache.
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Behind any landmark cure is years of medical research. But the old goal of research — to find a one-size-fits-all treatment for a disease, based on a set of standard protocols — must radically change to further and diversify advances in the field, experts argued at the TIME 100 Health Summit on Thursday.
Sean Parker, an entrepreneur and founder of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, came to the complex world of biotech, life sciences and health care research as an outsider. (Parker co-founded Napster and was the first president of Facebook.) “It seemed like there was tremendous opportunity. The field looked and felt a lot like the early Internet,” he explained at the summit.
“There was a lot of similarity in terms of enthusiasm and excitement and breakthroughs… and yet there were these inherent systemic obstacles that felt like they were slowing down progress,” Parker said. The cost of enrolling a patient in a clinical trial, for instance, can be “extraordinarily high,” and researchers focused on similar treatment goals often work separately from one another — without sharing data. The Parker Institute’s goal is to connect cancer doctors, share information among researchers and accelerate new treatments. Work at the Parker Institute has led to the first approved gene immunotherapy for blood cancers and Nobel Prize-winning immune-based cancer drugs.
“We’re all in it, at the end of the day, for our patients,” said Dr. Laura Esserman, professor of surgery at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. “We want to get people to a better outcome.” In the field of breast cancer, for example, the same cancer screening and treatment guidelines have traditionally been applied across the board. But people have different genetic profiles and risk factors, necessitating a range of different approaches. “Breast cancer is many diseases,” Esserman said, and a treatment path for one patient may not be appropriate for another.
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This precision-focused medicine approach is best achieved through collaboration, which is partly why the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is in the process of ensuring recipients of NIH grant funding must make their data accessible, said NIH director Dr. Francis Collins at the summit. “We can all learn from it.”
This approach is useful not only to discover how to treat people once they get sick, but also to understand how they remain well. “We have these one-size-fits-all approaches to how to stay healthy” — diet and exercise, for example — “and most people ignore them,” he said.
In the NIH’s “All of Us” trial, which is currently enrolling participants, researchers will follow 1 million Americans who are providing electronic health records, blood samples for DNA sequencing, and information from Fitbits and questionnaires. That rich trove of data will then be available to other researchers. “Imagine you have this as a platform to understand wellness,” Collins noted.