ABSTRACT
Triggers for migraine include stress, fasting, sleep deprivation and extremes of activity. Food triggers may sometimes be identified and it may be useful to keep a record of what is eaten just prior to a headache to see if a consistent pattern emerges. The incidence increases steadily with age, affecting boys and girls equally before puberty, and girls more commonly thereafter. Migraine is characterised by episodes of head pain that is always throbbing and frequently unilateral frontal or temporal in position. Idiopathic intracranial hypertension is the clinical syndrome of raised intracranial pressure, in the absence of space-occupying or vascular lesions, without enlargement of the cerebral ventricles and for which no causative factor can be identified. Ethmoid and frontal sinusitis may be associated with headache in older children. The headache is usually throbbing, dull and made worse when the child bends over or coughs.
