Experts at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) https://www.chla.org received $8.3 million from NIH to study long term effects of COVID-19 in children and young adults to determine the most effective ways to treat the serious consequences of this condition.
Experts are concerned that long COVID has the potential to cause a future public health crisis due to symptoms that persist for months after the initial illness or may arise later. Headaches, fatigue, difficulty concentrating or brain fog, shortness of breath, palpitations, changes in heart rate and sleep disorders are some of the lasting effects of COVID experienced by children and young adults who may have had only a mild case or even been asymptomatic from COVID-19.
CHLA is one of more than 30 institutions across the U.S enrolling tens of thousands of individuals in a national study called Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) https://recovercovid.org to understand the mystery surrounding the aftereffects of COVID -19.
RECOVER aims to develop a diverse population for a harmonized study of national scale that can be used by researchers to rapidly understand, treat, and prevent long term effects of COVID-19.
The study will enroll adults and also include pregnant women and children. CHLA will be one of several pediatric hospitals aiming to enroll 20,000 children and young adults under the age of 25. The study will include people with long-term effects of COVID, people who have recovered completely from COVID, and people who have never had COVID.
To begin the research, rapid screening evaluations of the heart, lung, liver, and kidney will be performed during short visits over a 4 year period. More extensive testing is planned in a smaller subset of participants, including electroencephalography, pulmonary function tests, magnetic resonance imaging, electrocardiography and neurocognitive testing.
The study will also focus on two other post COVID/PASC conditions such as Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in children (MIS-C) and COVID vaccine associated myocarditis. A total of 800 individuals with MIS-C and 200 participants with COVID vaccine-associated myocarditis will be enrolled nationally.
“Our goal is to identify children and young adults who may have this condition and help them toward recovery,” said John Wood MD, PhD, a Pediatric Cardiologist at CHLA and Co-PI on the study. “If your child or a child you know is still experiencing symptoms that interfere with daily life, talk to your pediatrician about being evaluated for the long term effects of COVID and consider participating in this study.”