COVID isn’t behind us — not yet, at least. And there are millions of kids in the U.S. suffering the effects of what’s called long COVID, according to medical journal Pediatrics.
The World Health Organization defines long COVID, roughly, as having symptoms three months or more after initial infection.
But there may be a difference in terms of how it impacts children and teens.
“This is a very large study,” Dr. Alexandra Yonts, a D.C.-based pediatrician, told WTOP.
“They’ve been able to define what are the most common symptoms in this cohort of children that have long COVID, or have the least prolonged symptoms after COVID,” Yonts said. “They’ve been able to show that there are differences in the symptoms.”
Yonts said the paper listed “around seven to 15% of their study population, but estimates nationally, globally have been anywhere between 2% and 25%.”
As for signs to look for when it comes to long COVID, Yonts said there’s a common denominator: fatigue.
There are other clues as well.
“The younger children tended to, in this study, show more gastrointestinal side effect, show a little bit more of the neurocognitive findings, the attention, the memory difficulties, whereas the adolescents really had more focus on the fatigue,” Yonts said.
As for why there appears to be a difference between age groups, Yonts said it might come down to bias, possibly because parents are answering questionnaires for younger kids while older kids may answer on their own.
“Adolescents have a higher expected performance in terms of what they’re supposed to do on a daily basis, or extracurricular activities going to school, the level of school commitment and the responsibility, and having fatigue will have a bigger impact on that, and therefore be more easily reportable and detectable by parents,” Yonts said.
Kids’ fatigue, on the other hand, may not be as noticeable, but them not eating the same way or having lots of gastrointestinal complaints may be more easily reportable. Yonts said this is also because parents are still often helping younger kids to the bathroom.
Yonts advises taking your child to your doctor if they still have symptoms after four weeks of the acute infection.
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