COVID-19 and children: Doctors see link between virus and neurological side effects - NBC News

Lim, a soft-spoken but animated clinician with a long professional interest in childhood inflammatory disorders, said Nia’s diagnostic and antibody tests had both come back negative, but he had seen other patients with the same "COVID picture” of symptoms who had tested positive.

He said the unreliable nature of testing on many early patients, and the specificity and chronology of her symptoms, gave his team no reason to diagnose her with anything other than COVID-19.

He considered Nia’s neurological symptoms as a late-onset, secondary inflammatory illness associated with COVID-19.

He and his Evelina colleagues have successfully treated a handful of COVID-linked cases, but he remains focused on the future neurological implications for children.

“We worry that the long-term effect would be in essentially brain growth,” he said, a particular concern among children and young adults whose brains are still developing.

The children were part of a larger cohort of 27 young patients who had suffered from the recently recognized multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C.

topping 4 million — could translate into thousands of patients with neurological complications associated with COVID-19, with some of those potentially focused on the children who suffered the multisystem inflammatory syndrome.

While there is evidence of higher rates of coronavirus infection among Black and Hispanic communities in the U.S., doctors say there isn’t yet enough data to confirm the relationship between race and the neurological side effects of COVID-19 in children.

Two recent British studies, one that looked at the neurological impact of COVID-19 on 43 patients ranging between the ages of 16 and 85, and another published in the Lancet examining 153 patients, ages 24 to 93, found that in those cases symptoms were varied but severe.

Research into the neurological effects of COVID-19 is still in its early stages, he said, but the adult patients included in the studies were infected by the coronavirus first, then exhibited a similar pattern of inflammation, allowing for “no other reasonable explanation.”.

That uncertainty is particularly pronounced among young patients, said Dr

Jennifer McGuire, a pediatric neurologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who has also noticed a recent uptick in patients with neurological symptoms

“It's not totally clear yet as to if those things are happening just because these kids are so systematically sick with SARS COVID-2,” she said, or whether it is the consequence of either “the post-infectious multisystem inflammatory syndrome,” or if these cases are “directly attributable to the neurological involvement of the virus.”

The doctors involved in treating patients like Nia — who weeks later suffers from flashbacks and significant memory problems — say they want to develop more precise and personalized approaches to the expanding neurological impact of this virus