Long COVID increases children’s risk for several serious conditions
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Long COVID increases children’s risk for several serious conditions, although the conditions remain rare, according to findings reported in MMWR.
Among the conditions, acute pulmonary embolism, myocarditis and cardiomyopathy, and venous thromboembolic event were all around twice as likely to befall children and adolescents who had experienced COVID-19 than their peers who had not.
The study compared 781,419 U.S. children and adolescents aged 0 to 17 years who had COVID-19, with a control population of 2,344,257 patients of the same age range without recognized COVID-19, during a period between March 1, 2020, and Jan. 31, 2022.
Compared with patients without previous COVID-19, those with previous COVID-19 had higher rates of acute pulmonary embolism (adjusted hazard ratio = 2.01), myocarditis and cardiomyopathy (1.99), venous thromboembolic event (1.87), acute and unspecified renal failure (1.32) and type 1 diabetes (1.23), “all of which were rare or uncommon in this study population,” the authors wrote.
“Reasons for these observed associations are likely multifactorial, and might be, in part, because patients without COVID-19 were selected from a cohort of patients with a health care encounter possibly related to COVID-19 and were less healthy than were patients with COVID-19 at baseline,” they wrote.
“Although most of the symptoms and conditions selected for the analysis were based on those observed in previous post-COVID studies, they are not unique to patients with a history of COVID-19, and many are common among children and adolescents.”
The researchers added that the findings showed how crucial it was to take the proper prevention strategies.
“These findings can be used to apprise health care professionals and caregivers about new symptoms and conditions that occur among children and adolescents in the months after SARS-CoV-2 infection,” they wrote. “COVID-19 prevention strategies, including vaccination for all eligible persons aged [older than] 6 months, are critical for preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection and subsequent illness and for reducing the public health impact of post-COVID symptoms and conditions.”