Migraine in children
I was a young boy in elementary school when I decided to capture a moment by writing a few things about it on my ruler. Here’s what I wrote:
It’s December 21
I’m at school taking up Math
I’ve got a headache
It’s 4 days ’till Christmas
It’s Fri, last day of school
I’m chewing gum
It’s 10:16
4 minutes to recess
I feel sick
Now other considerations aside, it’s interesting to notice that it looks suspiciously like I had some kind of “sick headache”. Now my best guess was always that my migraine attacks started when I was in my teenaged years, but who knows? Maybe it was earlier.
How young can children get migraine symptoms? The fact is, we don’t know for sure. We do know that they seem to have migraine symptoms just about as soon as they can tell us about it (though not everyone with migraine first had it as a child). We don’t have a full understanding of how infants understand pain, because they can’t explain it to us. But it seems likely that even infants may indeed have some experience with migraine. This may make it trickier to diagnose, since many people think of it as “normal”.
Find out about headaches and migraine in children in these articles
- Mommy, fix it! When child headache strikes…
- Dealing with child migraines?
- Abdominal migraine (typical of children)