Transition of headache care from childhood to adulthood: Focusing needs, barriers, and models of care. A position paper of the IHS Child and Adolescent Committee
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Headache disorders are among the most common neurological conditions in children and adolescents, often continuing into adulthood and causing substantial personal and societal burdens. Yet, the transition from childhood to adult headache care remains under-addressed, with critical clinical practice, policy, and research gaps. This narrative review synthesizes existing evidence and expert perspectives to highlight the urgent need for structured, developmentally appropriate transition models in headache care. It explores the evolving clinical features of headache in adolescence, increased vulnerability to different comorbidities, and changing health system expectations. We present a needs assessment reflecting the educational, emotional, and practical demands of patients and families. We identify provider- and system-level barriers, such as insufficient training, limited structured protocols, and inequitable access to specialized care, as significant obstacles to effective continuity. Drawing from established transition of care frameworks in other neurological conditions (e.g., epilepsy), we propose a dual-pathway model for headache care. We suggest key recommendations for clinicians and policymakers to promote anticipatory, patient-centered, and equitable developmental care strategies. International collaboration is essential to establish standardized guidelines and research priorities supporting optimal long-term outcomes and sustained quality of life for young people with headache disorders.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".