What is Kawasaki disease? Children and diseases associated with coronavirus

Last week, an 8-year-old child arrived at a Long Island hospital. His brother in Boy Scouts had begun chest compressions before the paramedics arrived at their home.

For the past two days alone, the hospital Coentilden’s Medical Center has accepted five critically ill patients aged 4 to 12 and has been somehow associated with the disease caused by coronavirus, Covid-19. You are suffering from an unusual disease that you think you will. A total of about 25 similarly ill children have been hospitalized in the last few weeks and have various symptoms ranging from a reddened tongue to enlarged coronary arteries.

The number of children with the new syndrome, first discovered in Europe last month in the United States, is still small. No one was known to have died, and many responded well to treatment.

What doctors call the “pediatric multisystemic inflammatory syndrome”, there are still no definitive data on how many children have become ill in the United States.

“There’s a lot I’m trying to learn about because it’s just a illness that has become apparent in two weeks,” Dr. James Schneider, director of pediatric critical care at Co-Enchildren, said in an interview. On Tuesday.

Doctors say the condition does not appear to be caused by a virus that attacks the lungs. This is a hallmark of adult coronavirus infection.

Some of the children in this state had respiratory problems and some needed to use ventilators, but “it doesn’t seem to be a lung-specific disease,” said the chief of pediatric emergency care. Dr. Stephen Kearney said that Columbia University and the New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital treat 10 to 20 children aged to teens.

From the rash to the redness of the eyes to blood circulation problems, he said, many of the symptoms appear to be due to the “overall inflammatory response.”

In some patients, the syndrome resembles a rare childhood disease called Kawasaki disease, which can cause inflammation of blood vessels, especially coronary arteries.

The symptoms of Kawasaki disease often start with fever and a rash, but if undiagnosed and untreated, the disease can cause serious heart disease, such as coronary aneurysms. The disease generally afflicts patients aged 6 months to about 6 years and is considered rare in the United States.

However, Dr. Kearney said it was important to distinguish Kawasaki disease from this coronavirus-related condition.

Although some symptoms are similar, Dr. Kearney said there appears to be a difference in the effects of coronavirus-related conditions on the heart, such as fever, abdominal pain, and sometimes a rash.

Shock is a rare complication of Kawasaki disease, but in the recent wave of coronavirus-related cases, many children have very low blood pressure, saying that their blood is unable to effectively circulate oxygen and nutrients. The organs of the body that are in toxic shock.

New York City Department of Health Monday night Issued newsletterAsk your doctor to report a case of the syndrome. The city’s health authorities knew of 15 cases, including patients aged 2 to 15 who have been in intensive care units since April 17, the city bulletin said.

However, interviews with doctors in New York City and Long Island suggest that at least 50 children are being treated for this syndrome and not all are receiving intensive care.

“I think I’ve seen 13 patients so far,” said Dr Nadine Choueiter of the Children’s Hospital in Montefiore, Bronx.

Still, doctors were reluctant to speculate on how it spread throughout the city. “It’s a question we always think about, and I don’t think we know the answer,” said Dr. Choueiter.

Queen of Richmond Hill, Jaden Aldwar, eight years old, had initially had a mild fever since April 23, said his father, Loop Aldwar.

But a few days later, Jaden became very weak and began to become powerless. On April 29, he was lying in bed watching a Pokemon TV episode. “Mom,” he cried before holding his breath. His face began to turn purple. His father, a boy scout, his 15-year-old brother began to do chest compressions and stopped only when the ambulance arrived.

At Cohen Hospital in New Hyde Park, Jayden put on a ventilator for three days before starting to improve. Jaden had a negative coronavirus test but a positive antibody test, suggesting he may have been infected with the virus in the last few weeks or months, the father said.

Jayden recently opened her eyes during a nurse-arranged video chat and began to smile or cry at her parents. “Last night he said,” I love you, Mommy, “his father said Tuesday.

Dr. Jaden, one of 11 children in the intensive care unit in Cohen Children, is considered to have the syndrome, doctors say.

Similar cases have occurred elsewhere in the country.

A healthy 12-year-old Juliet Daley from Covington, Louisiana woke up on April 3 with a severe stomach ache. “I spent an hour in bed getting up and 30 minutes down the stairs,” Juliet said in an interview on Tuesday.

Over the weekend, she got a fever, “I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t drink, because I spit everything,” she said. By Monday, “my arms were cold and my lips were blue,” she said.

She was so lethargic, “she fell asleep in a sort of bathroom,” her father, Sean Daley, said.

The family was said to have taken Juliet to a nearby hospital where he was experiencing an acute heart inflammation called fulminant myocarditis. Her heart rate was very low and her heart was unable to pump blood.

The hospital put Juliet on a ventilator and airlifted her to a medical center in New Orleans, about 40 miles south. During the intubation, her heart stopped, “she was arrested for less than two minutes,” Daley said. Then, in a helicopter, her heart stopped again, and she said she had to be revived by C.P.R.

Nine days after being hospitalized, she returned home to her parents and two brothers. “I was able to walk around, but I was still wobbled,” she said. Now Juliet, who likes to ride bicycles and do artwork, feels healthy.

Doctors in New York point out that cases of the new syndrome began to develop in about a month after the surge of Covid-19 in the area. The timing suggests, “It’s a post-infection immune response,” said Dr Leonard Krylov, pediatric president of NYU Winthrop Hospital in Minneola, NY.

In some cases, treating children with the new syndrome is easy and quick. Dr. Krylov recently treated a 4-year-old boy whose family had previously been ill with Covid-19. A few weeks later, the boy had a high fever, rash, and kidney problems. He was given one of the standard treatments for Kawasaki disease: intravenous immunoglobulin, serum taken from a blood donation. Dr. Krylov said that within a day his fever had dropped and his kidneys had returned to normal.

Early research Much less likely Covid-19 causes more serious illness than adults. In New York City there are 13,724 deaths of laboratory-identified Covid patients. According to city data, 6-year-olds were under 17 and all had underlying illnesses.

Doctors say that the risk of Covid-19 is much lower than in adults, despite increasing evidence that some healthy children are ill with the new syndrome.

“This is just another illness in adults,” said Jennifer Lighter, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at NYU Langone Medical Center who treated one pediatric patient with the new syndrome last week.

“It’s very rare and the kids are mostly working fine,” Dr. Reiter said of the new syndrome. “My patient is at home and doing great things.”