Migraine

I am curios if anyone has a child around age 11 that suffers from migraine with aura. My daughter gets them once every 4 to 6 weeks. I have tried to make the doctors do a cat scan or mri but they refuse said there is no need. I would like to know is this normal? The symptoms and signs remind me of a stroke every time.



Any info would be greatly appreciated

Mindi

Mindi,
I think maybe I'd be hunting for a different dr. It seems like it would be good sense to rule out certain problems. My 10 yr son is showing signs that he has inherited my migraines, but they're just the "simple" kind. No auras.

Hello and welcome to our forum family, Mindi! Our goal is to provide everyone with the information and support that we all need to manage our Migraines and/or headaches. To that end, we consider this a “safe harbor,” where nobody tries to sell us anything, and we all use “family-friendly” language so parents are comfortable letting their children read the forum with them.

Please take a few minutes to review our policies and guidelines along with the other information in the START HERE folder. For information about Migraines, a good article to begin with is Learning About Migraines - Where to Start

It's so clear that you're concerned. Aura symptoms can be scary sometimes, even for those of us that have them and know that's what they are. For the most part, aura is considered benign. When you're not sure that's what it is, though, it can be frightening. I don't blame you for being anxious and wanting to do all you can to help your daughter.

It's always trickier to sort out migraines in children, because there simply isn't as much known about children and migraine. There aren't as many treatment options that are considered safe, either, because medications aren't generally tested on children. A lot of treatment of children involves comfort measures and over the counter pain medications for the most part. There are some limited uses of triptans in adolescents, though, and some are prescibed Midrin. Beyond that, there are a small handful of meds doctor might prescribe in terms of a preventative.

The deal with CT scans and MRI scans and the doctor not wanting to do them probably stems from the fact that migraine almost never shows up on these scans. They are notorious for coming back negative, and crystal clean. While it might help to rule out any organic cause for the headaches other than migraine, if a doctor is convinced it's migraine based on presenting symptoms, then he probably won't order any scans to look for something else, when he knows they'd just come back negative.

Most of our discussion of children and migraine you're going to find in our Children and Migraine folder. You can get a much better idea of what kinds of treatments other kids have in place in those threads. Feel free to look around. We've also got a search tool at the very top of the site that will pull up articles, shareposts, and forum posts from all over the site. Doing some narrowed searches might pull up more info for you.

Here's one article you might find helpful...

How Can I Help My Child with Migraines and Headaches

Hopefully, others will be along shortly to share their experiences, too. If you're looking for something specific, and can't seem to find it, ask away, and we'll do our best to help.