Updated as new studies are published
Children and teenagers with long COVID had "significantly" reduced blood flow in the lungs, compared to the healthy controls.
https://talker.news/2025/02/25/doctors-detect-lung-abnormalities-in-kids-and-teens-with-long-covid/
Children with previous COVID-19 infection have a 25% to 28% higher risk of developing new gastrointestinal (GI) tract symptoms for up to 2 years than kids who did not report SARS-CoV-2 infections.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/after-covid-19-kids-more-likely-have-gi-symptoms-2-years
“The large proportion of children experiencing [long COVID] with any activity limitation highlights the need to examine the severity of activity limitation, functional outcomes, and days lost from school.” https://abcnews.go.com/Health/long-covid-impacting-1-million-children-cdc-study/story?id=118393880
COVID-19 “is affecting kids and kids can be affected long term. The idea of focusing on deaths is absolutely ludicrous. I know patient after patient and my friends also have been affected. They are developing long COVID. And I’m talking about arrhythmias, chronic coughs. One has her hair falling out two to three months after the infection. It is not good. This is causing heart disease, myocarditis, vasculitis in a number of patients.”
https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/view/long-covid-19-spreads-wide-toxic-net-that-includes-kids
More and more evidence is accumulating that the virus damages our immune system, making us more vulnerable to future infections. Crucially, T cells, a class of white blood cells in our body that play a vital role in our body’s defence against other infectious diseases, are depleted and exhausted, even with mild COVID-19 infections.
Children were 50% more likely to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes at the six-month mark if they have had COVID compared with children who had another respiratory infection.
Young people who had been diagnosed with COVID were about 2x more likely to experience a blood clot in the lung—and nearly 2x more likely to experience myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle; cardiomyopathy, a disease that makes it more difficult for the heart to function correctly; or blood clots in veins—in the year following their illness. They were also roughly 1.3x as likely to experience kidney failure, as well as Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disorder that destroys the pancreas’s ability to make insulin.”
The American Medical Association’s top journal, JAMA, in August published a key new study and editorial about pediatric long COVID. The editorial cites several robust analyses and concludes that, while uncertainty remains, long COVID symptoms appear to occur after about 10 percent to 20 percent of pediatric infections.
Preschoolers infected with C19 are more likely to experience psychological issues such as anxiety, mood disorders, developmental challenges, and oppositional behaviors.
https://mecp.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43045-022-00207-y
Mild COVID-19 alters brain structure and connectivity in key areas responsible for memory and cognition, emphasizing the lasting effects on young people’s brain health.
Some children may have symptoms that do not go away after their Covid infection; some may start to feel better and then start having new symptoms. Long Covid can happen to any child, even if they had mild or no symptoms during their Covid infection. Long Covid affects what a child is able to do during a day, like how they play or if they are able to go to school.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HLdHHrIbJKAdBoXs35FfSemtAJRCzAUxBqFs4ShYsQk/mobilebasic
“Theres a “misperception” that “if children have Long COVID, it will look like Long COVID in adults,” she says. But that’s not necessarily true. Gross’ study and others suggest kids can experience a wide range of complications after a case of COVID-19, reporting everything from sleep disorders and behavioral issues to nasal congestion.”
https://time.com/7013025/long-covid-symptoms-kids/
Children who had Covid-19 are at a higher risk of developing serious kidney problems later on, even if they had no previous kidney conditions.
https://thesicktimes.org/2024/07/02/research-updates-july-2/
A crucial reason paediatric long COVID has been overlooked is that children generally suffer less severe acute infections than adults. Governments and public health agencies have also been "pushing the narrative" that the only negative possible outcome of catching COVID is death, Dr Putrino says. "We looked at the acute phase and said, 'This doesn't seem so bad for kids', and we forgot about the cumulative risks over time." It doesn't matter how mild your acute COVID infection is, he says: "You have the same risk of developing long COVID. And I say 'cumulative' because the latest data shows us that with every reinfection, your risk of long COVID increases."
Long Covid in adults and children seems to be similar. “I think the main difference is in how it affects the nervous system. Because in kids, you’ve got a developing brain, so their brain manifestations tend to be a little bit different. But other than that … I would say there are more commonalities than differences.”
Severe neurologic conditions common in hospitalized kids with COVID, data suggest. The results suggest that almost 1 in 4 children with severe SARS-CoV-2 may have long-term neurological impairment, the authors say.
“Long COVID can impair children’s ability to learn and matriculate in school and impair their educational attainment. We have very little knowledge of whether long COVID will have any long-lasting effects on children. We just don’t have the data.”
https://www.healthcentral.com/condition/coronavirus/long-covid-is-a-chronic-disease
“Because COVID is hitting kids at a time that their bodies are changing every day, the things that are happening can have longer-lasting effects than they do in adults.”
https://covid19.nih.gov/news-and-stories/what-long-covid-looks-like-children-young-adults
Children exposed to SARS-CoV-2 in the perinatal period had more problems with breathing and used health care services more, including more inpatient, outpatient and GP attendances by two years of age when compared with the non-exposed cohort. Antenatal or neonatal exposure to SARS-CoV-2 is associated with an increased risk of social-emotional difficulties in early childhood
. https://le.ac.uk/news/2024/may/covid-children
Children with a history of SARS-CoV-2 infection are at an increased risk of GI symptoms and disorders during the post-acute and chronic phases of COVID-19. (Preprint) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.21.24307699v1
“Research tells us Covid itself continues to do more harm than lockdowns ever did.”
https://www.okdoomer.io/the-lie-thats-destroying-childrens-lives/
“Children with Long Covid are sometimes
sicker than cancer patients"- The pediatrician Nina Kollmar specializes in cancer. For three years, she has also been treating minors suffering from Long Covid. Here she tells about her everyday hospital life.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r_0cb4MfcpT1vuxamRVhV5ut5q5kHFGt/view?usp=drivesdk
43.74% of COVID+ children with with neurological symptoms have abnormal findings on neuroimaging
A study conducted at a dozen different medical centers throughout the US found 30% of children never fully recovered from the virus or its after-effects.
The researchers found that the children who had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies were twice as likely to develop islet autoantibodies as those who hadn’t been infected. Children who caught covid-19 before they were 18 months old had a 5 to 10 times higher risk of developing the autoantibodies – making them the most at-risk group.
This study indicates that fatigue and malaise are the most common manifestations of pediatric long COVID, along with shortness of breath, respiratory and gastrointestinal issues, difficulty concentrating and mental health concerns. It also finds that children living with long COVID can face less common conditions, including type 1 diabetes; brain fog; chronic fatigue syndrome; autoimmune diseases such as lupus and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, which results from a hyperinflammatory response to the virus observed two to six weeks after infection.
22% of children and adolescents hospitalized with acute Covid developed neurological symptoms. https://web.musc.edu/about/news-center/2021/08/18/misc-neurology
Initial data from 201 patients suggest that almost 70% had impairments in one or more organs four months after their initial symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4470
As early as February of 2021, the first study of long COVID in children found evidence suggesting that more than half of children aged between 6 and 16 years old who got COVID-19 had at least one symptom lasting more than 120 days. Even more alarming, the study reported that an astonishing 42.6% of those children were impaired in their daily activities by the symptoms.
“We may have disastrously underestimated one of the most serious sequelae: infection of the brain and nervous system. And we may have missed the neurological damage done to children and young adults who seem to have recovered from COVID-19.”
“Parents have been warned that the majority of children who tested positive for Covid-19 could suffer from blood vessel damage which can lead to several frightening conditions”
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/health/parents-issued-grim-health-warning-31285897
“Researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have found elevated levels of a biomarker related to blood vessel damage in children with SARS-CoV-2 infection, even if the children had minimal or no symptoms of COVID-19. They also found that a high proportion of children with SARS-CoV-2 infection met clinical and diagnostic criteria for thrombotic microangiopathy (TMA).”
“Kids who have had Covid might be up to 77% more likely to develop type 1 diabetes”. Pediatric diabetes diagnoses have doubled since the pandemic began in the US. We’ve known SARS-CoV-2 triggers diabetes since 2020.
1 in 6 kids have persistent COVID symptoms for 3 months after infection. “It was thought at first that the pediatric population was relatively spared from the long-term effects of COVID-19 after infection," the authors said. "But this changed rapidly with increasing reports & studies of pediatric patients not fully recovering from acute COVID-19."
Anxiety, depression and appetite problems were significantly increased among post-COVID-19 infected children, compared to those without a previous infection, which may be attributed to long COVID.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0282538&ref=okdoomer.io
Post-COVID syndrome severely damages children’s hearts; ‘immense inflammation’ causing cardiac blood vessel dilation
Not 'little adults': Experts say long COVID undercounted, misdiagnosed in kids
A recent study has shown elevated troponin levels in about 1 in 3 infants hospitalized w/ SARS-CoV-2. Elevations were revealed to be more common in that group than in infants w/ other infections. The risk was particularly high in the youngest infants. Troponin is a specific marker for damage to the heart muscle. When ppl have a heart attack, troponin rises. We know SARS-CoV-2 can direcly kill heart cells, cardiomyocytes.
https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(23)00740-0/fulltext
Long Covid could so far affect about a quarter of children suffering from coronavirus
Between 2021 and 2022, COVID-19 was a leading cause of death in children and young people in the United States, ranking eighth overall. This study focuses on deaths that were directly caused by COVID-19, rather than those where COVID-19 was a contributing cause. Therefore, it is likely that these results understate the true burden of COVID-19 related deaths in this age-group.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-01-31-covid-19-leading-cause-death-children-and-young-people-us