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Health Science Center:

 According to UTHealth Houston research, a significant percentage of ethnically diverse children from low-resource homes who have severe COVID-19 sickness report the virus's long-term effects.

According to the study, which was released on Monday in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, paediatric patients with private health insurance were 66% less likely than those with government insurance to report having long-lasting COVID symptoms.

The majority of paediatric COVID-19 cases are asymptomatic, however a tiny percentage of kids are also found to have multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a rare but serious illness linked to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Little is known about the COVID-19 illness's enduring symptoms in kids with and without MIS-C diagnoses.

More than 27% of patients with MIS-C diagnoses and 15% of patients without MIS-C diagnoses, according to Sarah Messiah, PhD, MPH, first author of the study and professor of epidemiology at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health Dallas Campus, experienced symptoms lasting longer than four months. We need to start seeing COVID sickness as a chronic paediatric ailment rather than just an acute one, according to these data, which show that a sizable percentage of children are affected by it over the long term.

Over 300 families with children who had been diagnosed with COVID-19 disease participated in survey interviews, many of which were performed by graduate students from the School of Public Health. While chronic long COVID symptoms might persist more than 120 days, acute long COVID symptoms last shorter than 30 days.

The age difference between children with and without MIS-C diagnoses was 54.49% for Hispanic, 19.23% non-Hispanic Black, and 79.49% covered by government insurance (mean age 6.43 years versus 9.08 years).

Health Science Center:

* About 11.5% of kids with MIS-C and 37.8% of kids without MIS-C had acute long COVID, while 26.9% and 15.3% had chronic long COVID.

* Compared to male children, female children were nearly twice as likely to report persistent COVID symptoms.

Luyu Xie, PharmD, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow and principal data analyst of the study at the school's Dallas campus, said, "Our research also emphasised the differences of age, sex, and race/ethnicity in terms of risk for chronic COVID symptoms." "We discovered that lengthy COVID symptoms were more frequently reported by people who identified as female, older in age, and members of underrepresented ethnic groups. Future specialised interventions can be influenced by these findings."

The American College of Chest Physicians is hosting the CHEST Annual Meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, and an abstract showing the effects of extended COVID on physical activity and cardiorespiratory fitness in children and teens is being given as a late breaker on Tuesday. Xie and paediatrics assistant professor Kubra Melike Bozkanat.

According to a second review of the same patient group, nearly one-third of those who engaged in any sports or physical activity either inside or outside of school reported a detrimental effect on their performance, with 66.7% of them attributing it specifically to their COVID-19 condition.

Tiredness (36.2%) and shortness of breath (10.5%) were specific concerns after returning to physical exercise after a COVID sickness. Those with lengthy COVID were more than twice as likely to experience a deterioration in physical activity performance compared to children without long COVID.

Many of these kids are unable to play sports, which is such a significant upheaval in their lives, Bozkanat added. "These findings are supported by our research. Long-term observation of the kids with chronic symptoms is required, ideally in a multidisciplinary clinic."

Overall, fatigue (6.7%), shortness of breath (5.8%), cough (5.1%), headache (4.5%), trouble concentrating (4.5%), disturbed sleep (4.5%), other symptoms (3.8%), anxiety (3.5%), body aches (3.5%), joint pain (3.2%), chest pain (2.9%), intermittent fever (1.9%), and loss of taste or smell (1.6%) were the symptoms of long COVID that were most frequently reported.

Jackson Francis, MPH, Weiheng He, MPH, M. Sunil Mathew, MSIT, Sumbul Shaikh, BS, and Sitara Weerakoon, PhD, were the co-authors of the abstract from the UTHealth Houston School of Public Health Dallas Campus. Senior author Jeffrey Kahn, MD, PhD, from UT Southwestern, along with co-authors Angela Rabl, MS, Alejandra Lozano, BS, from Children's Health System in Dallas, Nimisha Srikanth, a student at Texas A&M University, and Apurva Veeraswamy, a student at Southern Methodist University, also contributed to the abstract. Shaikh and Kahn are also employed by the Dallas Children's Health System.

Health Science Center:

Messiah, Xie, Mathew, Shaikh, Veeraswamy, Rabl, Francis, Lozano, He, Weerakoon, Srikanth, and Khan were co-authors on the paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, along with Madeline Borel, Valeria Sanchez, and Olivia Kapera, all from the UTHealth Houston School of Public Health Austin campus, and Clarissa Ronquillo, MPH.