HEADACHES
Your kid's been getting headaches all week, and you re worried: What if it's a brain tumor? Sure, you could rush him out for an MRI or CAT scan. But a better idea might be to keep a diary.
The odds of even recurrent headaches being due to a tumor are pretty slim, reports neurosurgeon Joseph Maytal, M.D., in Pediatrics (Vol. 96, No. 3). In a study of 78 kids who had brain scans because of frequent headaches, not one had a tumor or treatable physical abnormality. At a thousand bucks per MRI, that's a lot of cash for not a lot of useful information.
Maytal asks his patients to keep a diary recording the time, frequency, location, and intensity of their headaches. Combined with a physical exam, such a diary can alert a good neurologist as to which headaches are in-nocuous-and which demand immediate attention.
"Headaches in children have to be taken seriously," says Maytal, of Long Island's Schneider Children's Hospital. "But we don't need to perform MRI at the frequency at which we have been doing it."
