Psychotherapy versus usual care in pediatric migraine and tension-type headache: a single-blind controlled pilot study

Abstract

Background: Despite growing interest in psychotherapy in child and adolescent headache, efficacy studies in this research field have focused mainly on cognitive-behavioral therapies. Whereas relaxation and cognitive-behavioral techniques, in particular, have been found to reduce the intensity and frequency of headache in children and adolescents, data on psychodynamic psychotherapy in this population are lacking. Our aim was to explore the effectiveness of a brief psychodynamic psychotherapy program in the treatment of idiopathic headache in childhood and adolescence. Methods: Thirty-three newly diagnosed idiopathic headache sufferers aged 6-18 years, consecutively referred to our outpatient services, were randomized to receive either a brief cycle of psychodynamic psychotherapy (eight sessions administered at two-week intervals) or usual care (clinical interview, neurological examination, counselling, symptomatic therapy). The two groups were evaluated at baseline (T0) and at six months (T1) to be assessed for headache characteristics

Sex differences in the efficacy of psychological therapies for the management of chronic and recurrent pain in children and adolescents: a systematic review and meta-analysis

“…The following results present meta-analyses with data from the seventeen studies [1,3,5,7,11,27,28,31,34,42,53,66,69,70,80,83,84] from which data split by sex was made available by study authors. Data were available from a grand total of 1164 participants (316 boys and 848 girls) 2 .…”

“…to determine eligibility for inclusion. Of these, two were eligible for inclusion [5,33] . Thirty-seven articles were excluded for the following reasons: 5 were not an RCT, 1 described a study protocol, 1 did not include a sample of only chronic pain patients, 1 study focused on adherence rather than treatment of chronic/recurrent pain patients, 8 had adult samples, 2 had insufficient psychotherapeutic content, 12 were conference abstracts, 3 did not have the full-text available in English, and 1 was a dissertation.…”

“…For each case of missing data, authors were contacted no more than twice. Of the 44 requests for data made, 17 responses (38.6%) provided the requested data [1,3,5,7,11,27,28,31,34,42,53,66,69,70,80,83,84] . Thirteen responses (29.5%) indicated that the data was no longer available [10,12,37,46,49,51,57,58,64,67,71,75,76] , the authors of 14 studies could not be contacted or did not reply to the request for data [6,16,19,26,47,48,50,52,72,77,82,85,86] , and authors of two eligible studies were not contacted, as they did not measure any of the extracted outcomes [24] or the sample included only girls and could not be included in the meta-analysis of sex differences [41] .…”

“…All Chronic Pain Conditions. Data from fifteen studies [3,5,7,11,28,31,34,42,53,66,69,70,80,83,84] were entered into the meta-analysis, which revealed no differences in pain between girls and boys at the pre-treatment time point.…”

“…Data from eight studies [5,7,11,31,34,66,69,70] were entered into the meta-analysis, which revealed that girls reported significantly greater headache severity than boys at pre-treatment.…”