Their symptoms may be less severe, but one study shows that nearly six percent of children with COVID-19 still had symptoms three months later.
The eight-country study included 1,884 children aged 17 and younger who presented to an emergency department with COVID-19 and were followed up for 90 days.
Long-term COVID-19 was found in nearly 10% of children who were admitted to hospital and 5% of children who were seen in the emergency department and discharged.
The study involved the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary, the University of California, Davis School of Medicine in Sacramento, California, the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, and the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
It was peer-reviewed and published in JAMA Network Open on Friday.
The study says that COVID was more likely in children age 14 and older who had spent time in the hospital with more severe symptoms.
“We found that in some children, illness with COVID-19 is associated with reporting persistent symptoms after three months,” said lead researcher Dr. Stephen Freedman, a pediatric emergency physician and clinical scientist. from the Cumming School of Medicine.
“Our findings suggest that appropriate guidance and follow-up is needed, especially for children at high risk for COVID-19.”
The most commonly reported persistent symptoms in children were fatigue or weakness, cough, shortness of breath, or shortness of breath.
The study focused on emergency room admissions rather than community or school settings because the researchers were able to draw on another pediatric pneumonia study that was already underway more than two years ago years.
“In the context of this emerging disease, everybody was in a really urgent state to get the studies going. So we actually had a very nice infrastructure to build quickly,” said Dr. Anna Funk, an infectious disease immunologist and co-principal investigator of the Cumming School of Medicine study.
“They were not necessarily admitted to the hospital and not all of them entered a state of emergency. But they came to take the test, which could have been the test center or the easiest place to take a test at four in the morning,” he added.
Funk said that if the study had involved children with milder cases outside of an emergency room, the long-term rate probably would have been somewhat lower.
Of the patients who were followed, he said, most were quite young. The average age was three years.
“We also found that older children, over the age of 14, were also more likely to report these post-COVID conditions.”
The study was able to follow up with 80 percent of patients for up to 90 days, but Funk believes more research should be done to find out if the health problems are chronic.
The study found that the reported rates of long-term COVID in adults are substantially higher than those found in children.
“Unfortunately, there are no known therapies for prolonged COVID-19 in children, and more research is needed in this area,” said Dr. Todd Florin of the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
“However, if symptoms are significant, symptom-directed treatment is most important. Multidisciplinary care is warranted if symptoms affect quality of life.”
Funk said one thing parents could take away from the results is that vaccines are something to seriously consider.
“Six percent is still one in 20 children and that may worry some people when they are thinking about vaccinating their children,” he said.
“We know that vaccines are known to reduce serious illness, so it would seem like a good intervention to potentially reduce post-COVID conditions in children.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on July 22, 2022.
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