

“The vast majority of children exposed to the coronavirus have no illness or very mild illness,” says cardiologist Dr. Read about the latest findings on MIS-C, recently reported in The New England Journal of Medicine.

They concluded that MIS-C is rare in children, and that most children who have developed it to date have done well. (primarily on the East Coast, but also the Midwest and South). The panelists reviewed several dozen cases in Europe and the U.S. Jeffrey Burns, chief of Critical Care Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, the Collaboration brought together experts from a variety of fields in pediatrics - cardiology, rheumatology, infectious disease, intensive care, and Kawasaki disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now calling this emerging syndrome “multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C).” On May 2, the International PICU-COVID-19 Collaboration convened a Zoom conference to compare notes. Some children have also developed gastrointestinal symptoms, excessive blood clotting, kidney injury, or inflammation in the heart.

Doctors around the world have reported features of toxic shock syndrome and Kawasaki disease, in which blood vessels, including the coronary arteries, enlarge or form aneurysms. You may have heard the alerts in the news: a new inflammatory syndrome in a small number of children that appears to be related to COVID-19 and affects multiple organs in the body. (Images: Adobe Stock/Illustration: Patrick Bibbins, Boston Children’s Hospital)
