Vaccination reduces long COVID risk in children, study shows
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Key takeaways:
- COVID-19 vaccination can reduce the risk for long COVID in children.
- The COVID-19 vaccination rate was 67% in a cohort of over 1 million children.
COVID-19 vaccination reduces the risk for long COVID in children, according to findings from a study of more than 1 million children published in Pediatrics.
Although research has shown that many children experience persistent symptoms that last months after a SARS-CoV-2 infection, physicians have said that awareness of long COVID in children is lacking.
“When we think about how to prevent long COVID, obviously, one of the first things that we think about is vaccine effectiveness,” Hanieh Razzaghi, PhD, MPH, a data scientist at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), told Healio. “There are a lot of data — specifically clinical trial data — that look at vaccine efficacy, but the question about long COVID still remained unanswered. So, we were very motivated to undertake this.”
There was “urgency” to the investigation, another
“We're still just scratching the surface of what might treat long COVID,” Charles Bailey, MD, PhD, attending physician in the cancer center and academic investigator at CHOP, told Healio. “Most of the access to those is for adults, so there actually aren't a lot of treatment options available for children, and that makes prevention even more important.”
Razzaghi, Bailey and colleagues studied data from 17 health systems to assess vaccine effectiveness against long COVID in two groups of patients — aged between 5 and 11 years and 12 and 17 years — and the time period. The vaccination rate was 67% in the cohort of 1,037,936 children.
According to the researchers, the incidence of probable long COVID in the cohort was 4.5% and the incidence of diagnosed long COVID was 0.7%. They estimated that vaccine effectiveness within 12 months against long COVID was 35.4% among children with probable long COVID and 41.7% among children diagnosed with long COVID.
Estimated vaccine effectiveness was higher in the older age group (50.3%) compared with younger children (23.8%), and higher at 6 months (61.4%) than at 18 months (10.6%).
Children vaccinated after recovering from COVID-19 who endured a subsequent case of the illness also appeared to benefit, with a calculated vaccine effectiveness of 46% against probable long COVID.
“One of the things that was very interesting was that the effectiveness did wane over time,” Razzaghi said. “It was most effective within 6 months of the vaccine. Within a year, and then at 18 months, we were still seeing a protective effect, but it was reduced.”
Bailey noted that protection for teenagers “looked significantly better” than for younger children.
“I suspect that a lot of what's happening there is that we're better at spotting long COVID in teenagers, who can talk to us about how they're feeling,” Bailey said. “It gave me some pause because I think it tells me that we need to keep learning about what long COVID looks like in younger children.”
References:
COVID-19 vaccine reduces long COVID in children. https://www.chop.edu/news/covid-19-vaccine-reduces-long-covid-children. Published Jan. 16, 2024. Accessed Jan. 17, 2024.
Razzaghi H, et al. Pediatrics. 2023;doi:10.1542/peds.2023-064446.
Perspective
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This is an interesting and well-done study. The news is welcome and supports the growing body of evidence that vaccines work — they don't only reduce the risk for severe disease (hospitalization and death) in the acute phase but also reduce the risk for long COVID. The evidence base is less well developed in children than in adults. This study is certainly a welcome addition to the literature. I do hope it motivates better uptake of vaccination among children.
The study also shows that although vaccines work (in reducing the risk for long COVID), they are not a perfect shield. To achieve maximum risk reduction, additional layers of prevention measures are needed.
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