Head, neck infection rates among children doubled in 2 years
Key takeaways:
- Serious head and neck infections among children rose 61% from 2018 and 104% from 2021.
- There were no significant changes in incidence among adults.
The prevalence of serious head and neck infections among children doubled from 2021 to 2023, according to findings published in The Journal of Pediatrics.
“Rarely, common respiratory infections such as sinusitis, otitis media and pharyngitis extend into adjacent tissues, causing serious head and neck infection,” Serena Yun-Chen Tsai, MD, MMSc, clinical researcher in the department of dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and colleagues wrote. “Although several studies have described the post-pandemic epidemiology of common childhood infections, the trends in the serious complications associated with these common infections remains less well documented.”
Tsai and colleagues investigated trends among 360,001 children (mean age, 11.6 years; standard deviation, 5.2 years) and 3,105,588 adults (mean age, 53.6 years; SD, 18.5 years) who were hospitalized for head and neck infections between 2018 and 2023 in the United States.
Serious head and neck infection rates among children steadily declined from 2018 to 2021 (271 cases per 100,000 people, vs. 214 cases per 100,000 people), but they rose sharply to 353 cases per 100,000 in 2022. They increased further in 2023 to 436 cases per 100,000 people — a 61% increase from 2018 and a 104% increase from 2021, according to the authors.
Osteomyelitis cases among children did change significantly over the 6-year study period, Tsai and colleagues reported.
Among adults, serious infection rates did not surpass 200 cases per 100,000 people, and the researchers did not find a statistically significant change over time.
“As respiratory viral infections increase conditions conducive to secondary bacterial infections, the rebound of respiratory viral infections following the pandemic may also partially account for the increase in the incidence of invasive bacterial infections in the post-COVID-19 era,” Tsai and colleagues wrote. “Moreover, recent issues with vaccine hesitancy, antimicrobial misuse, and antimicrobial shortages may have all partially contributed to the rise in serious head and neck infections.”
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