The impact of the long corona pandemic appears to vary by age
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Symptoms of long COVID appear to be very different in young children and adolescents, and a better understanding of how the symptoms manifest could aid in diagnosis.
So far, most research on long COVID has focused on adults, in part because of a “misconception that children don’t get long COVID,” says Rachel Gross of New York University.
Gross and his colleagues are currently following 751 children ages 6 to 11 and 3,109 children ages 12 to 17 whose parents say they had previously been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The researchers defined long COVID as having at least one symptom that lasted more than a month, started or worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, and was present at the time of the study.
In younger children, these symptoms mainly included sleep problems, difficulty concentrating, and abdominal problems such as pain, nausea, vomiting, and constipation.
The symptoms were uncommon among about 150 children of the same age who had not previously been infected, and were confirmed by the absence of antibodies against the virus in their blood samples.
In contrast, symptoms in the 1,300 uninfected young people typically included pain, fatigue and loss of smell or taste.
It’s unclear why symptoms vary across age groups, but differences in hormones or immune systems could be to blame, Gross says. Or teenagers may simply be better able to vocalize their symptoms than younger children, says Danilo Buoncenso of the Gemelli University Hospital in Rome, Italy. For example, teenagers may complain of fatigue, but caregivers may only notice a younger child’s symptoms lingering when they vomit.
Armed with this data, the researchers developed a score that ranks how likely a young person’s symptoms are to have long-Covid. Currently, diagnosis depends on doctors ruling out other illnesses and recognizing that long-Covid can take many different forms. “Doctors would prefer a score or more objective criteria. Such a tool would definitely help clinicians at least recognize that a child may have long-Covid,” Buoncenso said.
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