A research team led by the National Institutes of Health's RECOVER Initiative and supported by its Clinical Science Core (CSC) at NYU Langone Health, has designed a new way to identify which school-age children and adolescents most likely have long COVID. Solely for the purpose of further study and not for use in clinical diagnoses, the team's new measure (index) identifies children and teens with the highest chances of having long COVID. The research index is based on long-term symptoms that were more common among children with a history of a COVID-19 infection when compared to those who had no history of infection.
Importantly, the study does not exclude any symptom from being part of long COVID. Published online on August 21, in the Journal of the American Medical Association , the study index used combinations of symptoms distinct for each age group—10 symptoms in school-age children and eight in adolescents —to indicate the likely presence of long COVID. Children and teens were found to experience prolonged symptoms after infection with the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, in almost every organ system, with most having symptoms affecting more than one system.
A clear pattern of symptom differences was seen between school-age children (6 to 11 years) and adolescents (12 to 17 years), underscoring the need for studies like RECOVER that track long COVID over time as children develop. In both children and adolescents identified as likely having long COVID, there w.