Headaches in children need high priority

  Parents are very anxious when they find a child with headache, because the child cries very painfully during the headache and parents are at a loss. It is recommended that when a child has a severe headache that is not relieved satisfactorily or the common causes cannot be explained, they need to seek help from a pediatric neurologist as soon as possible. In brief, excluding headaches caused by common colds and head trauma, there are several brain causes of headaches in children: 1. Encephalitis: Encephalitis can strike suddenly during childhood, especially in children with reduced immunity. If a child with headache has frequent nose picking, playing in areas with many plants, mosquito-infested areas, or is a picky eater, he or she must be on high alert for encephalitis. Atypical encephalitis in children is more common, that is, there is no obvious stiffness of the neck and impaired consciousness, but the lumbar puncture test is abnormal.  2. Cerebral parasitic disease: There is a high suspicion of cerebral parasitic disease when the mother is pregnant and when the newborn has pets, birds or frequent contact with farms.  3. Cerebrovascular disease: Aneurysm, venous malformation, cavernous hemangioma and smog in children can cause headache. Here I need to emphasize “smog disease”, which is a kind of cerebrovascular disease with congenital abnormal development of blood vessels in the brain, and can cause headache symptoms in childhood, which must be paid attention to.  4.Brain cyst: There are many congenital cysts in children, we can see temporal lobe cyst, hyaline septal cyst, occipital pool cyst, etc. Some of them have headache as the main manifestation, and some of them are accompanied by seizures. When the brain CT determines that there is a cyst, we should improve the examination as soon as possible to know whether the cyst is in tension or not, and then operate as early as possible, the effect is obvious.  5.Brain tumor: Brain tumor in children accounts for the second place of childhood tumors, and the most frequent ones are astrocytoma, germ cell tumor, craniopharyngioma, ventricular meningioma, etc. Tumors play an occupational effect to cause headache, especially in the midline position, pineal position or intracerebral region such as choroid plexus papilloma will cause hydrocephalus and then headache. If there is hydrocephalus, a shunt is needed, and if the tumor is clear, it should be removed as soon as possible.  It is true that there are many causes of headache in children, and there are other possible cases that we will not go into here. We hope that parents should pay attention to headache in children, closely observe the characteristics of headache, and if there is any abnormality, welcome to come to the hospital for medical treatment, for the health of the flowers of our country, we should all work hard.