As a teenager, my occasional headaches became chronic within a couple years. Many other people have told me the same story and a study presented at the 58th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology confirms the frequency of this occurrence.
The nationwide study of 18,714 adolescents found that headaches are causing a lot of disability for kids 12 to 19 years and that their headaches are not adequately treated. In a one-year period, 5% of boys and 7.7% of girls reported frequent migraines.
Researchers found that adolescents’ migraines often go from one or two times a month to 10 to 15 times a month within a couple years. The quick transition from occasional to chronic migraine is astonishing. Especially because there is some evidence that headaches become harder and harder to treat as their frequency increases.