Patient preferences for headache treatment

Little is known about what children and adolescents, and their parents, want headache treatment to achieve and what kinds of treatments they prefer. Youth and parents’ agreement on headache outcomes and treatments is also unclear.

We designed a questionnaire to ask youth and their parents what their preferences are for headache outcomes and treatment. We co-designed this questionnaire with input from parent and patient partners. We then asked youth with headache disorders and their parents to complete the questionnaire in pairs, and we looked at what they reported and how much youth and parents agreed on specific items.

This work will help clarify treatment and headache outcome preferences, and the amount of agreement, between patients and their family. This will help to guide future studies as well as discussions in the clinical setting.