According to a new report from pediatric anesthesiologists, infectious disease specialists and pediatricians at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore (CHAM) and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, while most children infected with the novel coronavirus have mild symptoms, a subset requires hospitalization and a small number require intensive care.
Published in the Journal of Pediatrics, the report compares 46 children between one month and 21 years old, who received care either on a general unit, or in the Pediatric Critical Care Unit (PCCU) at CHAM. This is the largest single-center study from the United States to date to describe in detail the full spectrum of COVID-19 disease in hospitalized children.
Researchers found that children requiring intensive care had higher levels of inflammation and needed additional breathing support, compared to those who were treated on a general unit. Of the children being cared for in the PCCU, almost 80% had Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), which is more commonly associated with critically ill adult COVID-19 patients, and almost 50% of children with ARDS were placed on ventilators.
On average, children in the PCCU stayed in the hospital four days longer than children on the general unit. Researchers at CHAM and Einstein also found that while obesity and/or asthma was highly prevalent in children in this study, these complications did not increase the likelihood that a child would need enhanced levels of care.
“We know that in adults, obesity is a risk factor for more severe disease, however, surprisingly, our study found that children admitted to the intensive care unit did not have a higher prevalence of obesity than those on the general unit,” said lead author Jerry Y. Chao, M.D., M.Sc., pediatric anesthesiologist, CHAM, and assistant professor of anesthesiology, Einstein.
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