The classification of chronic daily headache in French children and adolescents: A comparison between the second edition of the International Classification of Headache Disorders and Silberstein-Lipton criteria

Jean-Christophe Cuvellier¹, Frédéric Couttenier², Stéphane Auvin¹, Louis Vallée¹

¹Department of Child Neurology, Pediatric Clinic, University Hospital, Lille, France; ²Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition, Pediatric Clinic, University Hospital, Lille, France

Abstract: Few data are available on the applicability of both the criteria proposed by Silberstein and Lipton (S-L) and the International Classification of Headache Disorders-II (ICHD-II) in the classification of children and adolescents with chronic daily headache (CDH). The International Headache Society recently added revised criteria (ICHD-IIR) for chronic migraine to its Appendix. We retrospectively reviewed all charts of 34 children and adolescents (<17 years) with primary CDH presenting to the outpatient clinic of the Universitary Department of Neuropediatrics of Lille between February 2004 and February 2006 and tried to classify their CDH according to both S-L criteria and the recently published ICHD-IIR. Thirty-two children (94%) and 33 children (97%) could respectively be successfully classified into one subtype of CDH according to the S-L classification and the ICHD-IIR. Transformed migraine was the most common diagnosis (61.8%), followed by new daily-persistent headache (20.6%) when the S-L criteria were used. Twenty-three children and adolescents (67.6%) could be classified under one of the migraine categories according to the ICHD-IIR classification. We think that both S-L and ICHD-II classifications, when used with detailed headache histories and diaries, are adequate to classify chronic daily headache in children and adolescents.

Keywords: chronic daily headache, classification, children, adolescents