4 Troubled Teens Blog

Two new major studies found that being physically abused as a child significantly increases the risk for migraine headaches as a teenager or adult.

• Dr. Esme Fuller-Thomson of the University of Toronto analyzed data from a 2005 health survey of 13,000 Canadians.
  
• Seven percent of the studied youth reported having been physically abused as children.
• Among that group, 18 percent had migraines as adults, compared to 9 percent in the survey who had not been physically abused.
  
• Dr. Fuller-Thomson's team looked at other reasons for migraines, such as parental unemployment, drinking or drug use and found that even with such histories, there still was a 36 percent greater risk of migraine among adults who had been physically abused as children.

The second study was from Dr. Jong Ling Fuh and his colleagues at Taipei Veterans General Hospital in Taiwan, who looked at headache symptoms and histories of physical abuse among 4000 children ages 13 to 15-years-old.

• In this study, 30 percent of the teenagers who had been physically abused had migraines compared to 21% of teens who had not been abused.
  
• The more frequent the abuse, the greater the risk of migraine.

Both studies appeared in the journal Headache.

Labels: child_abuse, health, trauma

Posted By: Aspen/CRC