Benign post-traumatic encephalopathy in young people and its relation to migraine.

Thirteen children and adolescents between ages 4 and 19 years developed transient nonconvulsive neurological symptoms and signs within a few hours apparently trivial head injuries. Some became quite seriously ill, but all made rapid and complete recoveries. Some of these young people are known to have suffered from migraine before and/or after this episode, and in all but one of the others a family history of migraine was elicited. With these patients are compared five younger children who developed epileptic fits after equally slight trauma. A diagnosis of migraine should be considered in children who develop delayed impairment of consciousness after head trauma, with or without convulsive phenomena or focal neurological deficits, and in whom specialized investigations reveal no sign of a mass lesion or of intracranial hemorrhage.