Post COVID-19 Syndrome: A New Mysterious Disease That May Affect Children Even Worse

Post COVID-19 syndrome for kids is a new mysterious disease discovered earlier this year.

A body needs time to rest after the long battle of contracting and beating the coronavirus infection. This recovery is vital to regain and normalize our health and strength. But for some children, recovery is not what happens next.

Multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) in children is the new and mysterious disease that affects hundreds of children worldwide since it was discovered earlier this year, as per Science Alert. MIS-C is also known as a pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome or PIMS.

The disease was linked to COVID-19, which emerges in kids even after mild COVID-19 infections. However, the coronavirus disease's light case doesn't guarantee that MIS-C won't be very serious or sometimes even fatal.

Alvaro Moreira, a neonatologist from the University of Texas Health Science Centre at San Antonio, says in UT Health, "Children did not need to exhibit the classic upper respiratory symptoms of COVID-19 to develop MIS-C, which is frightening."

Moreira added that children might be asymptomatic, and no one knows a kid has the disease. After a few weeks of being unaware, they may develop exaggerated inflammation in the body. Alvaro and his team uncovered almost forty observational studies in a comprehensive new medical research review into MIS-C from this year. The study involves 662 children patients who developed post COVID-19 syndrome.

MIS-C is known to cause severe inflammation in several parts of the body, such as the heart, kidneys, lungs, brain, eyes, skin, etc. Kawasaki disease and toxic shock syndrome are the two conditions that MIS-C resembled from. But the spread and amount of the overall inflammation in MIS-C is worse, as per Moreira.

"It can be lethal as it affects multiple organ systems," Alvaro added. MIS-C has so many different faces that at first, clinicians struggled to understand whether MIS-C by the heart and the lungs, the neurologic system, or the gastrointestinal system. Moreira said that after several months into the COVID-19 pandemic, they are getting the post-COVID-19 syndrome a clearer picture, although there is much that they don't figure out about the syndrome. They also don't understand the long-term recovery prospects for the young people who experience severe condition.

Out of the 662 known cases looked in the new review, 71% of the children admitted to the ICU, and the average length of staying in the hospital was about eight days. Patients showed fevers in every case, and the majority also manifested abdominal pain or diarrhea (73.7% of cases) and vomiting (68.3%). Rashes and conjunctivitis were also common symptoms.

In the study, 11 of the children who showed post COVID-19 syndrome died while the observed death rate for children with MIS-C is low at about 1.7% of all child patients. Researchers reiterated that this figure is much higher than the 0.09% mortality rate observed in children with coronavirus.

In cases of children who recovered from post COVID-19 syndrome, a lot of concern is still going on about what MIS-C might do to their hearts. About 90% of the children in the study had an echocardiogram (EKG) test. In the test, 54% of the results came back, showing abnormalities in the children's hearts.

These abnormalities include depressed ejection fraction of the heart's reduced ability to pump oxygenated blood to body tissues, dilation of coronary blood vessels, and aneurysm of a coronary vessel (about 10% of patients) that might cause a higher risk of future cardiac events.

"These are children who are going to need strict observation and follow-up with multiple ultrasounds to see if this will br resolved or if it is something they will have for the rest of their lives. That's catastrophic to a parent who at first had a healthy child, and then he/she is in the tiny percentage of people who developed MIS-C after COVID-19 infection," Moreira says.

According to EClinicalMedicine, the authors note different limitations to their study and pointed out that they might have missed some MIS-C studies despite their comprehensive research. However, even if there's a lot that we still don't know about MIS-C, the picture that it is emerging is a grave matter. Another disease associated with COVID-19 that many children who experience post COVID-19 syndrome is much worse than the coronavirus that they previously encountered.

According to the authors in their study, children usually show signs of MIS-C 3-4 weeks after the COVID-19 infection. Most of the diagnosis will progress immediately into shock and cardiorespiratory failure. Early medical attention is a crucial action in the rare cases of suspected MIS-C patients, which can save their lives.

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