United States: In the reports, it is revealed that early in the pandemic, some children fought off COVID and later faced organ failure after a few weeks.
As experts reveal, most of them recovered after going through aggressive treatment. However, their sudden illness, and the dubbed multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), has remained a mystery for many.
More about the news
A team of researchers from UC San Francisco, Chan Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and Boston Children’s Hospital has found the cause behind these cases, after performing a study, having to have implications for other autoimmune diseases as well.
The researchers said that the children’s immune systems had latched onto a part of the coronavirus, similar to a protein present in our body’s skin, heart, kidneys, GI tract, etc., and therefore initiated a major attack on their own issues, as ucsf.edu reported.
The study results were published in Nature Journal on August 7 and shed light on the avid correlation between a viral infection and following autoimmune disease.
What more have the experts revealed?
According to Aaron Bodansky, MD, a critical care fellow in UCSF’s Department of Pediatrics and lead author of the paper, “Thanks to our world-class team, we’ve found an answer for how children get this mysterious disease,” as ucsf.edu reported.
“We hope this kind of approach can help break new ground in understanding similar diseases of immune dysregulation that have stumped us for decades, like multiple sclerosis or type 1 diabetes,” he continued.
Covid’s Effect on Children
It is revealed that with the spread Covid among millions of people, the jump in cases of MIS-C has seen a rise, affecting one in 2,000 children under eighteen with the virus.
Adrienne Randolph, MD, MSc, a critical care pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital and co-senior author of the paper, had taken a track record of such cases and noted samples from patients via a national network of pediatric ICUs.
Randolph said, “Every time COVID peaked in an area, about 30 days later, there’d be a peak of these kids presenting with what looked like septic shock in our network of ICUs, except they were negative for all kinds of infection,” as ucsf.edu reported.
“If we hadn’t intervened and supported them, they could have died,” Randolph continued.
Treatment of children with MIS-C
While treating children with MIS-C at UCSF, Bodansky discovered it to resemble Kawasaki disease or any other rarely occurring pediatric inflammatory diseases.
Mark Anderson, MD, PhD, the co-senior author and also who directed the Diabetes Center at UCSF and is a CZ Biohub SF Investigator, suggested trying out a tool, which he and Joe DeRisi, PhD, and the resident of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco were using.
The tool is called Immunoprecipitation Sequencing (PhIP-Seq) and is required to be used to check if it could discover the cause of MIS-C.
PhIP-Seq screens blood for autoantibodies, which had, by mistake, attacked the human body.
Anderson mentioned, “We thought, could there be some sort of trigger with the immune system that leads to MIS-C?” as ucsf.edu reported.
“Thanks to Overcoming COVID-19, which our pediatric ICU was part of, we realized there might be enough samples to do PhIP-Seq on kids that had MIS-C and compare their antibodies with kids that had gotten COVID but did not get MIS-C,” he continued.