Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, many children had very few symptoms after being infected with SARS-CoV-2. But about one in two thousand developed a serious inflammatory disease that resembled Kawasaki disease after a few weeks. How that was possible has now been clarified, at least in part.
It is sometimes a fatal disease multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) from Pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome (PMIS) has been announced. It is characterized by persistent fever and symptoms such as: rash in the mouth, hands or feet, hypotension or shock, heart abnormalities, coagulopathy, gastrointestinal symptoms and organ failure.
In a beautiful study done in Nature, Aaron Bodansky et al show how this works. They took advantage of that phage immunoprecipitation series (PhIP-Seq) method in which they screened blood samples from these children for antibodies targeting viruses or autoantibodies. To be precise, this included samples from 199 children with MIS-C and, as a control, 45 samples from children who had not developed that disease after Covid-19.
The findings of Bodansky et al. The researchers talk about simulation. They also found that these children had cross-reactive T cells that target both. No wonder their immune systems were completely breached. But since this was not the case in all sick children, the researchers believe that other disease mechanisms, which are not yet known in this simulation, must also be involved.
The researchers have no doubt that their approach is also a way for research on other post-infectious autoimmune diseases to progress.
two: 10.1038/s41586-024-07722-4
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2024-08-08 06:30:00
#severe #childhood #illness #Covid #partially #explained
