Of 1,813 nonhospitalized COVID-19 patients, 4.5% reported at least one lingering symptom, 8.0% of whom were infected before Delta, and 3.4% of whom were infected during Delta or later. Of all participants, 23.3% reported one or more underlying medical conditions before the Delta wave, compared with 17.8% amid Delta and beyond. Through CARES, participants are offered as many as three SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests at a participating laboratory of their choice over 6 months.Īdults and parent proxies also completed a brief online questionnaire on demographic information and medical history. In the second study, published yesterday in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, a team led by University of Texas at Houston researchers analyzed data from the ongoing Texas Coronavirus Antibody Response Survey (CARES) of Texans aged 5 to 90 years from October 2020 to May 2022. "It is biologically possible that reduced viral replication and decreased inflammation could reduce the risk of neurologic complications," they wrote. They called for further study of the association of remdesivir and dexamethasone treatment with lower odds of neurologic complications. "Our findings emphasize the importance of COVID-19 immunization in children, especially in high-risk populations, such as those with neurologic co-morbidity," they wrote. The findings show that neurologic complications are common in children hospitalized with COVID-19 and are tied to worse hospital outcomes, the authors said. "However, the power to detect differences may have been limited by the relatively short portion of the study in which Omicron was the dominant circulating strain." "If true, we would expect subsequent variants to also have lower odds of neurologic complications compared to wildtype SARS-CoV-2," they wrote, adding that they found no evidence of a link between the Omicron variant and neurologic complications. The reasons for the association of a lower likelihood of neurologic complications and a Delta infection are unclear, although the link may be due to the greater proportion of children who had been either infected with the virus or immunized by that time than during the period dominated by the wild-type virus, the researchers said. Neurologic CCCs were linked to greater odds of a neurologic complication (aOR, 4.14). Lower odds of a neurologic complication were also associated with COVID-19 treatment with the antiviral drug remdesivir and/or dexamethasone, a corticosteroid. Seven percent of patients developed a neurologic complication, the most common of which were fever-triggered seizures (3.9%), non–fever-related seizures (2.3%), and encephalopathy (brain damage or disease) (2.2%).Ĭhildren with neurologic conditions had longer hospital stays, higher hospital costs, more intensive care unit (ICU) admissions (29.8% vs 21.8%), longer ICU stays (3.2 vs 2.5 days), more hospital readmissions, and higher rates of in-hospital death (1.8% vs 0.6%) than those without these conditions.įactors tied to a lower likelihood of neurologic complications included younger age (adjusted odds ratio, 0.97), infection during the Delta variant surge (aOR, 0.71), and presence of a nonneurologic CCC (aOR, 0.80). A total of 37.1% of children had a complex chronic condition (CCC), and 9.8% had at least one previously diagnosed neurologic CCC. Of the 15,137 patients, 82.1% had a primary COVID-19 diagnosis, and 17.9% had a secondary diagnosis of COVID-19 and a related complication. In a large, multicenter study published today in Pediatrics, a team led by Vanderbilt University researchers followed 15,137 COVID-19 patients aged 2 months to 17 years released from 52 US children's hospitals participating in the Pediatric Health Information System database from March 2020 to March 2022. Two new US studies describe pediatric COVID-19, one finding that 7.0% of hospitalized children developed neurologic complications such as seizures, and the other showing that even mild infections can lead to long COVID.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |