Incidence of long COVID 'strikingly low' in children, Alberta researchers find
CBC
New research from the University of Alberta has found a "strikingly low" incidence of long COVID among children ages eight to 13 who contracted COVID-19.
"It's reassuring that in our study we found that most kids resolve symptoms within two weeks," said Lyndsey Hahn, a postdoctoral fellow in the pediatrics department of the University of Alberta's faculty of medicine and dentistry.
Hahn is lead author of the study, Post-COVID-19 Condition in Children, which was published this month in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
Only one child in a study group of 271 developed long COVID after a COVID-19 infection, the study found.
"The incidence of [long COVID] in this study was strikingly low," the authors say in a research letter.
Hahn, however, cautioned in an interview that the study is only "a tip of the iceberg" and that more research is needed to better understand long COVID in children.
Between August 2020 and March 2021, researchers from the U of A and the Women and Children's Health Research Institute in Edmonton recruited a study group of 1,026 children ages eight to 13.
Parents provided consent and tracked their children's symptoms. The children were followed for 76 weeks.
At the time they were recruited for the study, none of the children had been infected with the virus that causes COVID-19.
Of the 1,026 children, 572 did not test positive for COVID-19 during the study period while 454 did.
The researchers focused on a group of 271 children who tested positive for COVID and for whom there was sufficient data to determine the presence of long COVID.
Of that group of kids, only one — or 0.4 per cent — met the World Health Organization's definition of the condition.
That child's symptoms resolved near the end of a 14-week post-infection followup period, the study authors noted.
Common symptoms of long COVID include fatigue, shortness of breath and cognitive dysfunction, although the WHO says more than 200 different symptoms have been reported.
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