Washington says it’s a hyper response to COVID-19 in children. Medical professionals have seen a similar syndrome in Kawasaki, but there’s a big difference.
“The MIS syndrome is always associated with exposure to the COVID virus, Kawasaki is not, so there are some similarities but they appear to be two distinct entities.”
The biggest issues in MIS-C are associated with inflammation of the blood vessels.
“The blood vessels, including the lungs but elsewhere as well; the heart, the kidneys, the GI tract the intestines, all of those have been described,” said Washington.
The deaths of two children in Colorado have been linked to a mysterious syndrome, directly related to COVID-19. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment confirmed this week that their deaths were a result of Multi-symptom Inflammatory Syndrome in Children, or MIS-C.
“We had not described this as a medical condition before COVID,” said Dr. Reginald Washington, Chief Medical Officer at Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children.
“For reasons we don’t understand, the body has a hyper response to the virus. We see it in adults, but we see it in a different form in children, which is the MIS-C. So children, when they get COVID, don’t have the advanced respiratory but they do have other symptoms,” he said.
The inflammation is something doctors test for in the hospital but Washington says there are many symptoms that are associated with it.
“The first thing that your viewers need to understand, is that there’s no test to see if your child has MIS-C because it’s a syndrome by definition it’s a collection of a variety of things and if you have enough of ‘em, you’re diagnosed with the syndrome,” Washington continued, “So the first one is prolonged fever, 2-3 days of a fever without a known reason. Secondly, they have a variety of other symptoms. They can have skin involvement they can have GI symptoms with diarrhea and stomach pain. They can have neurologic symptoms such as headache, they usually have a rash they have redness of the palms of the hands and the soles of their feet and then there’s some laboratory things that we measure to show that they have inflammation. So if they have enough of those things and they have evidence that they’ve had the COVID virus, that’s how the diagnosis is made.”
The CDPHE says there have been a total of 7 cases of MIS-C in Colorado since the pandemic began.
At Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children, there have been three all of which have been discharged.
“We don’t want parents to panic but we do want them to be on the lookout for these symptoms,” he said.
