Many parents assume that frequent headaches mean their child needs glasses, so they ask their doctor to refer their child for an eye exam. But, according to a new study, vision or eye problems are rarely the cause of recurring headaches in children, even if the headaches usually strike while the child is doing schoolwork or other visual tasks. This research was presented last month at the American Academy of Ophthalmology annual meeting in Chicago.
Eyeglasses don’t necessarily help kids who have headaches, a study says. But does this study account for all factors?
The researchers, pediatric ophthalmologists at Albany Medical Center in Albany, N.Y., conducted a retrospective review of the medical records of 158 children under age 18 who were seen for frequent headaches at the ophthalmology clinic from 2002 to 2011.
Although about 14% of the children reported that their headaches occurred while doing visual tasks like homework, and about 9% reported visual symptoms associated with their headaches, a need for vision correction did not appear to be the primary cause or a significant factor in any of these cases, the researchers concluded.
In addition, follow-up reports from parents showed that headaches improved in 76.4% of all study subjects, including children who did not receive new vision correction prescriptions as well as those who did. Furthermore, new prescriptions did not make children more likely to have their headaches improve.
About 30% of the children in the study had eye conditions that went beyond the need for vision correction, including strabismus, amblyopia or other, more serious conditions. But because this was a retrospective study, the researchers were unable to connect these factors with headache causes.
“We hope our study will help reassure parents that, in most cases, their children’s headaches are not related to vision or eye problems, and that most headaches will clear up in time,” said Zachary Roth, M.D., who led the research team.
But, for optometrists who see a lot of these children, this study doesn’t quite hold water.
“As far as I can tell, this was a poorly done, retrospective clinical study presented as a poster, and was not published as a peer-reviewed paper in a respected journal,” says Dominick Maino, O.D., M.Ed., professor of pediatrics/binocular vision at Illinois College of Optometry in Chicago. “It appears as if they did little to no assessment of the binocular vision system beyond strabismus. It also looks as there was no assessment of accommodation—which is unfortunate because most of the research published in this area suggests that accommodation plays a major role in headaches experienced by patients.”
Dr. Maino says that the poster’s primary value was simply to give notoriety to the American Academy of Ophthalmology. “It does all patients who suffer from headaches of a visual etiology a major disservice,” he says.
