BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Headache is one of the most common pains during childhood and children have higher sensitivity to pain in body surfaces, which can be evaluated by algometry. This study aimed at reviewing in the literature studies evaluating pressure pain threshold (PPT) in children with and without headache. CONTENTS: Bibliographic databases were searched, including Pubmed (National Library of Medicine), LILACS (Latin-American and the Caribbean Literature on Health Sciences) and ADOLEC (Health during Adolescence) to identify relevant scientific studies. Four studies met all inclusion criteria with a total of 492 children and adolescents, aged from 5 to 15.8 years. From them, 75 had migraine, 61 had tension headache and 356 had no headache history. CONCLUSION: There is no consensus about headache influence on PPT in children. Due to the scarcity of studies, one could not conclude that pressure pain threshold is lower in children with headache as compared to healthy children.
Children; Headache; Pain threshold
