Long-term health problems after Covid-19 are also common among children and young adults. This is the result of a study by TU Dresden, published in October 2021 as an unaudited preliminary publication It has now been published in the specialized journal “Plus Medicine” after specialist examination.
The team led by health researcher Martin Rossler used anonymized health insurance data to compare the frequency of 96 pre-specified symptoms in about 157,000 people with Covid-19 in the six months following infection in the general population. It found that children and teens were 30 percent more likely to develop health problems for three months or so after infection. Health problems were 33 percent more common among adults. However, because adults get sick more frequently, the absolute increase in disease burden is twice as high as for children and adolescents. The study indicates that late effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection in children are rare, but not insignificant.
The results of the working group also show that the putative long-term effects are expressed differently in children and adolescents. They mainly experienced malaise, tiredness, fatigue, cough, sore throat and chest pain, while adults three months after contracting the Covid-19 virus mainly had disturbances of smell and taste, fever and shortness of breath. “The current study now confirms the internationally described clusters of post-Covid symptoms in adults in Germany and shows that children also have a different post-acute pattern,” neurologist Peter Perlett tells Science Media. “Unfortunately, what this study cannot show is whether there really is a causal relationship between SARS-CoV-2 infection and all the symptoms described here.
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