Obese kids suffer more disabling headaches

By Anne Harding

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Children who have migraines are
more likely to be overweight than the general population, while
overweight kids suffer more disabling migraines than their
normal-weight peers, a new study shows.

“If you have two unhealthy conditions, migraine and
obesity, you are even more disabled than if you’d had either
one,” Dr. Andrew D. Hershey of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital
Medical Center, the study’s lead author, told Reuters Health.
He reported the findings June 22 at the American Headache
Society’s annual meeting in Los Angeles.

Past research has linked obesity to headache and migraine
in adults. To investigate if such a connection exists in
children and teens, Hershey and his colleagues looked at 440
migraine patients between the ages of 3 and 18 treated at seven
specialty headache centers.

While 15.5 percent of the general population of children is
obese, 21.1 percent of the headache patients met the criteria
for obesity, the researchers found.

In people under 18, obesity is defined as a BMI in the 95th
percentile for a person’s age group, meaning it is higher than
that of 95 percent of his or her peers. A BMI in the 85th to
95th percentile puts a young person at risk of obesity, while
healthy BMI is between the 6th and 85th percentiles.

Using a six-item questionnaire known as the PedMIDAS,
Hershey and his team evaluated how disabled the patients were
by their headaches. The obese kids’ average scores were 41.9
and at-risk individuals scored 42.9, compared to 33.8 for the
group as a whole.

About 10 percent of kids between the ages of 5 to 15 have
migraines, Hershey noted. Before adolescence, boys are more
likely to have migraines, but about 40 percent outgrow them as
they reach adolescence. Girls’ migraine risk rises as they
enter puberty, and among adults, women are three times more
likely than men to have migraines.

“Obesity probably contributes to the more frequent
migraines, meaning if you’re obese you’re less likely to do the
healthy habits we talk about — which is eating healthy,
exercise and getting good sleep,” Hershey noted. Obesity and
migraine can also be a vicious circle, he noted, with headaches
making it more difficult for a child to be active.

He and his colleagues are currently following the patients
in the study to see if losing weight will reduce the severity
of their headaches.