Abstract
Headaches are one of the most common symptoms driving children and adolescents to neurologists. The vast majority of headaches in children and adolescents is, fortunately, not evoked by a serious causation and therefore, does not threaten their lives.
Nevertheless, it reduces the quality of their lives and that's why it needs to be diagnosed and treated well and as early as possible. This large group of headaches is called primary headaches and it is the major part of this paper.
We are focusing mainly on the 2 most frequent types of primary headaches: tension headaches and migraines. We mention short-lasting trigemino-autonomic cephalgias for the sake of completeness, though they are very rare in children.
On the other end of spectrum are the secondary headaches. The pain here is an alarming symptom of an underlying disease (of the central nervous system or other systems) and the neurologist's goal is not only to relieve the pain but, first of all, to find and solve the primary cause.
We discussing this group of headaches first because of its possible seriousness.