New Delhi: A new study analyzing long Covid in children and teenagers in the US has found that symptoms differed between the two groups. While children had more problems with the brain and stomach, teenagers suffered from fatigue, physical pain and loss of sense of smell and taste. Moreover, long Covid symptoms were more common in adults and teenagers than in teenagers and children. This highlights the importance of age-group-based COVID-19 research, according to the team of over 140 researchers who conducted the study.
The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), is part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s “RECOVER” initiative, which aims to understand and prevent long Covid. Long Covid refers to a set of symptoms that persist months after a COVID-19 infection.
The researchers examined more than 5,300 children and adolescents, of whom about 3,860 – 751 children and 3,109 adolescents – had a history of the viral infection.
Caregivers were asked about about 75 symptoms that occurred at least 90 days after an initial COVID-19 infection and lasted at least one month. They were also asked about their child’s general health and quality of life.
Among children ages 6 to 11, headaches (57 percent) were the most common long-COVID symptoms, the study found, followed by memory/concentration problems, sleep disorders (44 percent) and abdominal pain (43 percent).
About 80 percent of teenagers felt tired or lacking energy during the day, 60 percent had physical pain in their body, muscles and joints. 55 percent of teenagers continued to suffer from headaches, and 47 percent continued to have problems remembering or concentrating.
The researchers identified different symptom groups for each age group and developed a Long Covid Research Index that indicates the likelihood of the disease in a child or teenager.
The index, separate for both age groups, included 18 long-lasting symptoms that were more common in children and 17 that were more common in teenagers.
“The symptoms that make up the research index are not the only symptoms a child can have, and they are not the most severe. But they are the most predictive in determining who may have long COVID,” said the study’s lead author, Rachel Gross, an associate professor in the departments of pediatrics and population health at New York University.
In the group studied, 45 percent of infected (338) and 33 percent of non-infected children as well as 39 percent of infected and 27 percent of non-infected adolescents reported having at least one long-lasting symptom, according to the authors of the study.
26 symptoms in infected school-age children and 18 symptoms in infected adolescents persisted in at least five percent of participants, it said.
