London, Europe Brief News- Nearly 6% of children suffer from long-term COVID-19 symptoms, a new study finds.
The eight-country study shows that nearly six per cent of children with COVID-19 still reported symptoms three months later.
The eight-country study included 1,884 kids aged 17 and younger who went to an emergency department with COVID-19 and had 90-day followups.
Long-term COVID-19 was found in nearly 10 per cent of children who were admitted to hospital and five per cent of children who were seen in an emergency department and discharged.
The study involved the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine, the University of California, Davis School of Medicine in Sacramento, Calif., Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Chicago’s Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
It was peer-reviewed and published in JAMA Network Open on Friday.
The study says long COVID was more likely in children aged 14 and older who had spent time in hospital with more severe symptoms.
“We found that in some children, illness with COVID-19 is associated with reporting persistent symptoms after three months,” said principal investigator Dr. Stephen Freedman, a pediatric emergency medicine physician and a clinician-scientist in the Cumming School of Medicine.
“Our results suggest that appropriate guidance and followup are needed, especially for children at high risk for long COVID.”
The most reported persistent symptoms in children were fatigue or weakness, cough, difficulty breathing or shortness of breath.
The study focused on emergency room admissions as opposed to community or school locations because researchers were able to piggy back on another study about pediatric pneumonia that was already underway more than two years ago.
