Diarrhea and Vomiting May Be Important Signs of Covid in Children – Research | Science

Diarrhea and vomiting can be important signs of Covid-19 in children, researchers have been asked to update the NHS official list of symptoms, according to the researchers.

of Checklist In the case of a child’s coronavirus, it currently contains only three symptoms: high temperature, a new persistent cough, loss or alteration of smell and taste. The latter was added to the list in May.

In many studies of adults, muscle pain, fatigue, confusion, chest pain, Stomach trouble.. Among them, an unreviewed study by researchers at King’s College London, Covid symptom research app, Symptom turned out to correspond to the following 6 main clusters In adults, one of them is primarily a gastrointestinal problem.

Researchers at the University of Queens Belfast now confirm that upset stomach is a symptom of Covid-19 in children and have identified it as an important sign of the disease.

“In our group, diarrhea and vomiting were more predictive than coughing and changes in smell and taste,” said Tom Waterfield, the first author of the study. “If you really want to diagnose an infectious disease in your child, you need to consider not only upper respiratory symptoms but also diarrhea and vomiting.”

Going from the current three recognized symptoms, Waterfield, when testing symptomatic children, identified 76% of cases assuming a fully accurate test and adding gastrointestinal symptoms to the checklist: 97%.

of Investigation It took place between April 6th and July 3rd and involved the children of more than 990 health workers from 2 to 15 years old across the UK. No one was hospitalized at Covid-19.

Everyone took blood samples and tested for antibodies to coronavirus. We also collected data on whether symptoms occurred. It is important that this was done before the antibody results were revealed.

The team found that 68 children (6.9% of the total) had antibodies to the disease. This suggests they had Covid-19 and half of these are reported to have symptoms

Some symptoms are particularly common, with 31% of 68 children reporting fever, 18% headache, 19% diarrhea, vomiting, and gastrointestinal symptoms such as stomach cramps. In children without antibodies, the numbers were 11%, 4%, and 3%, respectively.

Although only 34 children were symptomatic in the study, Waterfield said this finding was important because diarrhea and vomiting were particularly obvious and obvious problems to discover.

He said the study should also reassure parents. “A lot of kids stroke their noses this winter. [and] Sneezing-it’s not a sign,” he said.

Professor Tim Spector of King’s College in London said the findings were rewarded by the work of his team. “Our data on nearly 250,000 children in the Covid Symptoms Survey app suggest that children with positive reactions have a wide range of symptoms, and coughing is less common than in adults,” he said. Said.

“Intestinal symptoms and loss of appetite, and classic fever are also common,” said Specter, who had gastrointestinal problems in both adults and children, but slightly in children compared to other symptoms. It was general.

Danny Altman, a professor of immunology at Imperial College London, said it might be useful to include this finding in the symptom checklist. “This is an important study and, along with previous data from Kings College app users, we are starting to build cases to include gastrointestinal symptoms in the Covid-19 case definition criteria,” he said.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that for those who do not get a positive PCR result during the positive hours of the virus, they are facing the difficult gray area of ​​defining the symptoms of the case. The more confident you can be, the more you can do this, which will be very important over the coming weeks as it requires the highest level of scrutiny of outbreaks among children returning to school. Will be.”