Migraine Headaches and Sleep Disorders in Children

Copyright: © 2013 Ming X. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The connection between headaches and sleep disorders has recently come under greater scrutiny as more and more studies are being conducted to elucidate this relationship. Questionnaire studies have shown a significant increase in the sleep disturbances amongst patients with headaches compared to healthy controls [1-4]. This “disturbed sleep” includes insomnias such as difficulty falling and remaining asleep, parasomnias such as restless leg syndrome, sleep paralysis, hypnagogic startles, and bruxism, and disordered breathing such as snoring and trouble breathing [1]. Morning, or “awakening” headache patterns can be signs of a sleep disorder. Snoring and sleep apnea can exacerbate migraine headaches [5]. This relationship has been demonstrated in adults and more recently it has been reported in studies focusing on children [2-4,6]. For example, Heng and Wirrell [2] compared children with migraines to their siblings without migraine and found that the migraine sufferers had a higher occurrence of sleep disorders when compared to their healthy control siblings [2]. Not only did the children with headaches have a higher rate of sleep disorders, but they found that the patients with greater migraine severity had significantly increased sleep disturbances [2].