The Hunt to Understand COVID-19's Connection to Kawasaki Disease (Time)
BY JAMIE DUCHARME
MAY 27, 2020 8:00 AM EDT
Dr. Jane C. Burns has studied Kawasaki disease for four decades. It took only four months for COVID-19 to turn her life’s work upside down. Unusual numbers of children and teenagers living in COVID-19 hotspots like Lombardy, Italy and New York City have developed an inflammatory condition (officially called Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children, or MIS-C) that looks a lot like Kawasaki disease. In many cases, the children have also tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies, suggesting the syndrome followed a viral infection.
Burns thinks Kawasaki disease’s name may have done it a disservice. When it was first discovered in the 1960s, the condition was named Kawasaki “disease” instead of Kawasaki “syndrome,” and that designation has stuck. But a “disease” is something with a determinate cause, whereas a “syndrome” is a collection of symptoms that may not have a single catalyst—which far better characterizes Kawasaki, Burns believes... More recently, she says, doctors have begun to question that notion. Her research center has found that Kawasaki disease tends to surface in clusters of genetically similar children... different triggers could cause an inflammatory response in children with certain genetic predispositions, Burns says. It’s possible that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is one of those triggers.
... Michael Levin, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Imperial College London, compared classic Kawasaki with emerging clinical and laboratory reports of MIS-C. ...the MIS-C results in much more severe symptoms than the typical case of Kawasaki, He notes that adults with serious cases of COVID-19 are also seeing extreme inflammatory responses; they just manifest differently, causing issues like respiratory distress. It’s possible that MIS-C is the pediatric version of that inflammation, he says.
... For scared parents, it can be frightening to know that researchers are still working to understand both Kawasaki disease and MIS-C. But all of the experts interviewed by TIME say parents do not need to panic. Kids are still much less likely than adults to develop a serious COVID-19 infection. Only about 2% of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. have been among children younger than 18, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even among kids who do get COVID-19, MIS-C is a very rare complication. About 170 MIS-C cases are under investigation in New York state, compared to thousands of pediatric COVID-19 cases there, and many parts of the country have yet to see a case.
More here
https://time.com/5842902/covid-19-kawasaki-disease/