title: Diagnostic factors in pediatric primary headache.
abstract: Primary headaches are frequent in children. They are difficult to diagnose because there is much disagreement about the interpretation of the historical data and the use of signs and/or symptoms in diagnosis. It would be useful, therefore, to standardize this procedure. We used linear discriminant analysis to determine a classification rule capable of diagnosing new cases of chronic and recurrent primary headache in children. We considered 23 symptoms in 118 patients. Through discriminant analysis we chose five variables: frequency of the attacks, type of pain, neurologic deficits, nausea, and vomiting. With this classification rule, we obtained a total correct classification of 84.7% for migraine, psychogenic headache, and non-defined headache in respect to the diagnoses formulated by a pediatrician and a child neuropsychiatrist after 3 months of follow-up. Our method for diagnosing migraine has a sensitivity of 95% and a specificity of 100%. The algorithm, validated on another 105 pediatric patients, produced a total correct result of 82.9%.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Systems Dynamics and Bioengineering, National Research Council (LADSEB-CNR), Padova, Italy.
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Golferini
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Facchin
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cavinato
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lovison
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Pitassi
authors.forename: P A
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Battistella
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted; D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D005260:Female; D006261:Headache / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008881:Migraine Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D011336:Probability