Children hospitalized with COVID-19 commonly experience neurologic complications
Physicians at Monroe Carell Jr. Youngsters’s Hospital at Vanderbilt have discovered another excuse to vaccinate youngsters in opposition to COVID-19: to assist scale back the chance of neurologic issues brought on by the virus.
“COVID-19 and Acute Neurologic Problems in Youngsters,” a examine of greater than 15,000 youngsters hospitalized with COVID-19 throughout 52 youngsters’s hospitals over a two-year interval, was just lately printed in Pediatrics, a peer-reviewed medical journal printed by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“We decided that neurologic issues are comparatively widespread, occurring in about 8% of kids hospitalized with COVID-19,” mentioned James Antoon, MD, PhD, MPH, assistant professor of Pediatrics at Monroe Carell. “The issues are nearly uniformly related to worse outcomes and might be life-altering situations.
“The easiest way to forestall these issues is to decrease the probabilities of getting COVID-19 by means of vaccination, masks carrying in indoor crowded locations and staying residence when sick.”
Antoon, the primary creator of the paper, and colleagues famous that when the Omicron variant first emerged, instances of neurologic issues in youngsters have been reported, however a lot of the understanding of the issues have been derived from grownup research.
This current evaluation of kids ages 2 months to 18 years previous confirmed that neurologic issues, outlined as encephalopathy, encephalitis, aseptic meningitis, febrile seizure, non-febrile seizure, mind abscess and bacterial meningitis, Reye’s syndrome, and cerebral infarction, have been related to elevated threat of ICU admission, readmissions, in-hospital mortality, and elevated hospital prices in comparison with hospitalizations with out neurologic issues.
As of April 2022, over 13 million instances of COVID-19 have been reported in youngsters and adolescents in the US, in keeping with the examine.
As we present in our examine, COVID-related issues can have a major influence on the lives of kids. With the emergence of recent, extremely contagious variants, the potential sufferers which are in danger is rising.
Our findings emphasize the significance of vaccination and prevention of COVID-19 in youngsters with the intention to forestall these doubtlessly life-threating issues.”
James Antoon, MD, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Monroe Carell
The work was supported by the Nationwide Institute for Allergy and Infectious Illnesses of the Nationwide Institutes of Well being.
Antoon’s co-authors included Monroe Carell and Vanderbilt College Medical Heart colleagues, Leigh Howard, MD, MPH, Alison Herndon, MD, MPH, Katherine L. Freundlich, MD, Carlos G. Grijalva, MD, MPH, Derek J. Williams, MD, MPH and Youngsters’s Hospital Affiliation Principal Biostatistician Matt Corridor, PhD.
