The more overweight children and teenagers are, the more frequent and disabling their headaches, according to the first national study to look at possible links between obesity and headaches in kids.
A great payoff of slimming down is that heavy kids tend to gain some relief from headaches, says Andrew Hershey, a pediatric neurologist at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, who led the study at seven U.S. headache centers. The report on 913 children and teenagers, followed for six months, is published online in Headache.
Adult obesity already has been tied to headaches, so helping kids get into the normal weight range could prevent years of pain and disability, Hershey says.
Chronic headaches are common in childhood, with surveys suggesting they're experienced by anywhere from one out of four to one out of 10 kids. In Hershey's study, some had headaches nearly every other day. The more overweight a child, the more headaches and the worse the pain.
But the overweight children who had lost weight three months after their first visit reported about half as many headaches as the heavy kids who continued to gain weight. On the other hand, gaining or losing weight had little effect on headaches for kids of a normal weight.
Children and teens in pain from headaches may be less physically active, prompting them to pack on pounds, Hershey speculates.
Also, there's some evidence that adults with migraines have low levels of leptin, a hormone that causes a feeling of fullness after eating. This can encourage overeating, Hershey says.
So the heavy kids with headaches may have low leptin levels, too, Hershey suggests. That would help account for the tie between their extra weight and headaches.
Childhood headaches also could be due to dehydration. "Overweight kids don't like to drink water, and they're very often dehydrated, which leads to headaches," says Melinda Sothern, an exercise physiologist who has treated thousands of heavy children at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans.
Stress, too, triggers headaches, and the bullying faced by heavy children can be terribly stressful, adds Matthew Davis, a pediatrician at the University of Michigan's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital. Parents of overweight and obese kids rated bullying as their top health concern for children, far higher than parents of normal-weight children, in a new online poll directed by Davis.
"We know from other studies that these overweight kids tend to be the targets of bullies, and that their overall quality of life is lower," he says.
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