Carasco M, et al. – The physicians aimed to investigate psychological variables as potential predictors of headache remission in children and adolescents. In children aged between 9 and 15 years, successful coping with stress, in general, contributed to remission of a pediatric headache after 2 years. Overall, psychological characteristics had only small predictive value. In empirical studies, the issue of remission definitely needed more scientific attention.

• The physicians gathered data on biological, social, and psychological variables by questionnaire as part of a large population-based study (N=5,474).
• They selected children aged 9 to 15 years who suffered from weekly headaches for this study sample, N=509.
• They conducted a logistic regression analysis with remission as the dependent variable.
• For this study, in the first step sex, age, headache type, and parental headache history were recorded as the control variables as some data already existed showing their predictive power.
• Psychological factors (dysfunctional coping strategies, internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, anxiety sensitivity, somatosensory amplification) were recorded in the second step to assess their additional predictive value.

• In this study, highly dysfunctional coping strategies decreased the relative possibility of headache remission.
• The remaining psychological variables did not reach any significance, ie, it did not further contribute to the explanation of variance of the basic model containing sex and headache type.
• Shockingly, parental headache and age were not predictive.
• Regarding headache remission, the model explained only a small proportion of the variance (R²=0.09 [Nagelkerke]).