What causes childhood headaches? Italian researchers reported
that stress factors were responsible for headaches and migraines
in children. Nowadays, every other child is familiar with the
painful condition. In teens between 11 and 18 years of age,
migraine affects 7% of boys and 12% of girls. Researchers
studied the headaches and migraine history of 125 children and
teenagers. Among those children for whom stress played a role as
trigger factor, 78% was attributed to school related stress:
among the essential elements, that included academic stress,
exhaustive reading assignments and homework, exams, fear of
failure but also bullying in the classroom. In second place,
involving 68% of the cases, sleep deprivation was identified as
a trigger factor - caused by nightly television, computer games
or use of social networking. Other stress factors causing pain
were family stress (25%), travelling (20%), extracurricular
activities such as sport (20%), environmental factors such as
weather changes or noise (10%) or