Guidetti Vincenzo, Arruda Marco A., Ozge Aynur (Eds.). Headache and Comorbidities in Childhood and Adolescence

Springer, 2017. — 246 p. — ISBN: 978-3-319-54725-1.The expressive development of childhood headache knowledge can be easily visualized through a mere PubMed search. Using the keywords headache, child and adolescent, and solely the age filter, the reader can check the volume growth of publications year by year, decade by decade. The same advance can be observed by limiting the search to only clinical trials. From the first paper on childhood headache registered in this digital archive in 1948 to the early 1990s, we have a total of 1121 papers, number that doubles throughout the “Decade of the Brain” reaching 1253 at the beginning of 2010, up to now 1748. The same occurs with migraine as shown in the following PubMed publications’ timeline.
A milestone in this trajectory is the pioneering and seminal work of Professor Bo Bille of Uppsala University in Sweden who in 1962 published his thesis Migraine in Schoolchildren [2].
The evolution of knowledge occurred in several areas, however, in an expressive way in the classification, diagnosis, and epidemiology of childhood headache. Particularly noteworthy are the emergence of prevalence studies around the world, studies on the impact of headache in children and adolescents, and the identification of comorbidities of migraine in this age group.
The impact of this breakthrough was notable in clinical practice. From the 196 possible headache diagnoses that appear in the second edition of the International Classification of Headache Disorders (ICHD-II) [3], 113 have been described in pediatric population [4]. The studies have provided evidence that not only migraine but also other primary and even secondary headaches have a peculiar clinical presentation in childhood and adolescence.
The study of migraine comorbidities in childhood and adolescence, the reason for this book, is extremely important in clinical practice, both for diagnostic issues and for the management and treatment efficacy of these patients [5, 6].
It is critical to recognize the presence of comorbid conditions in the clinical assessment of headache patients, especially in children and adolescents, as early identification of these symptoms may lead to improved headache management [7,8]. Moreover, the identification of comorbid disorders in headache could provide modern treatment options and improve the knowledge about causes and consequences of headache [9].
A striking and distinctive aspect of this book is the editorial norm of the authorship of chapters being entrusted to authors from different countries, often different continents, which resulted in a cooperative work that contemplates different medical realities. This experience is certainly reflected in these pages that we hope to please the reader.