Recurrent headache is common among Australian adolescents and increases substantially across the teen years among young females, a national study has found.

The carers of more than 6000 children aged 10-17 participating in the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) were asked if they experienced frequent or recurring headache, defined as:  ‘being one that exists for some period of time (weeks, months, years) or reoccurs regularly’.

The responses, obtained in 2016 showed that recurrent headache prevalence was similar for both males and females in the 10–11 years age group, at around 6.4-6.6%.

After this, female adolescents showed a progressive increase in recurrent headache prevalence across the age groups, reaching  13.2% in the 16–17 years old age group.

For adolescent males, recurrent headache prevalence was seen to be more consistent over the age groups and ranged from 4.3% to 6.4%.

For most adolescents with recurrent headache, the frequency was predominantly a few times per month, though in around 6-12% of males and 5-10% of females the recurrent headache was reported to occur most days of the week.

For those with occasional recurrent headache, the frequency tended to decrease across the age groups for both males and females, while the  proportion of adolescents reporting headache rarely/a few times per year increased over time.

The severity of headache also varied over time for female adolescents, with as many as 23% of those with headache reporting them to be severe in the 14-15 year age group. In male adolecsents there was no trend over time for severity, but in some years more than one in four of those with headache described them as severe.

Recurrent headache was also significantly associated with lower health-related quality of life scores for all functional domains for both sexes. Headache frequency, but not severity, was also significantly associated with lower health-related quality of life scores, in both males and females.

The study investigators from Griffith University, Brisbane, said there had been little previous data on the prevalence of headache in Australian adolescents, and the findings from the study, “likely to reflect the impact of recurrent headache on the functional and emotional wellbeing of adolescents, within the Australian population.

The trend for increasing recurrent headache in female adolescents was in line with previous findings of migraine prevalence and stage of puberty in females, they noted.

“The current investigation provides robust evidence of both the extent of recurrent headache experienced in Australian adolescents at different ages across the adolescent years, and the burden of recurrent headache on Health related Quality of Life,” they said

The results are published in The Journal of Headache and Pain