According to a study of 1025 13-17 year-olds, gaming, texting, or staring at the TV for hours on end are unlikely to cause headaches in adolescents, but listening to one or two hours of music every day may do the trick. The study appears this week in BMC Neurology.

The researchers interviewed 489 teenagers who claimed to suffer from headaches and 536 who said they did not. When the two groups were compared, no associations were found for television viewing, electronic gaming, mobile phone usage or computer usage.

85 percent of study participants used computers, 90 percent watched television or listened to music daily; only 23% of the participants used their mobile phones and only 25% played with game consoles on a daily basis. The study revealed that daily consumption of music was significantly associated with suffering from any type of headache, although, as lead author Astrid Milde-Busch points out, "It cannot be concluded whether the habit of listening to music is the cause of frequent headaches, or the consequence in the sense a self-therapy by relaxation".

"Excessive use of electronic media is often reported to be associated with long-lasting adverse effects on health like obesity or lack of regular exercise, or unspecific symptoms like tiredness, stress, concentration difficulties and sleep disturbances. Studies into the occurrence of headaches have had mixed results and for some types of media, in particular computer games, are completely lacking,"  Milde-Busch added.

Citation:  Milde-Busch et al., 'The association between use of electronic media and prevalence of headache in adolescents: results from a population-based cross-sectional study', BMC Neurology, February 2010, 10(12); doi:10.1186/1471-2377-10-12