Headaches, worries, and anxiety among children have increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It seems that physical symptoms worsened due to increased media viewing time and less physical activity, resulting in increased stress.
Dr. Mark Disabella’s team, who leads the headache program at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, USA, conducted a study on the change of headache in children through a questionnaire surveying changes in headache characteristics and lifestyle factors from the summer of 2020 to the winter of 2021 among 107 children. it started.
Migraine and other headache disorders are very common diseases among adolescents and children, but during the pandemic, social distancing disrupted their daily lives and high stress from the threat of disease has been shown to affect the lives of children with headaches . The survey found that 60% of pre-pandemic children’s patients reported experiencing less than 15 days of headaches per month, compared to 50% after the pandemic. Instead, the number of patients with persistent, daily headaches increased from 22% before the pandemic to 36% after the outbreak began. 49% of children said their headaches had worsened since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and 54% said their physical activity had decreased due to the pandemic. During the pandemic, 61% of children watched media for more than six hours a day.
Dr Mark Disabella, who led the study, said, “It is important to better understand how daily changes and stress affect children’s health and mood. , it may have intensified the headache by increasing the amount of time watching the media.” It is generally believed that watching a screen causes headaches, and lack of exercise is often cited as a trigger for migraines.
Headache disorders have a high rate of mood disorders, including anxiety and depressive symptoms. In addition to the complexities of life, pain management, and school and extracurricular activities that young patients already experience, this isolation environment may have created additional stress during isolation.
Dr. Mark said, “Although this study has limitations as it is an observational design with a small sample, it should not be overlooked that the pandemic had an impact on headache patients. I hope we can take a moment to talk to each other about how we felt.”
This study, recently published in the Journal of Child Neurology, was titled Children’s headaches and mental health worsened during pandemic.
Reporter Jeong Hee-eun [email protected]
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