Serious Neurologic Diagnoses Among Patients Discharged From The Pediatric ED With Headache

Background. Headache is a common complaint among children in the emergency department (ED). Although usually benign in nature, some headaches are secondary to serious neurologic diagnoses (SND). We seek to characterize the proportion of patients discharged from the ED with a diagnosis of headache and found to have SNDs during subsequent visits. Methods. We performed a multicenter retrospective cohort study using data from forty-eight pediatric hospitals in the Pediatric Health Information System between October 1, 2015 and March 31, 2019. We included patients ≤18 years discharged from the ED with an ICD-10 primary diagnosis code for headache. …