Rutgers Health partners in the National Institutes of Health’s effort to characterize the long-term effects of the virus on young patients
In the most comprehensive national study since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a team of researchers, led at Rutgers by Lawrence Kleinman, MD, RWJMS, that includes a Rutgers-organized consortium of pediatric sites has concluded that long COVID symptoms in children are tangible, pervasive, wide-ranging, and clinically distinct within specific age groups. Results of the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
While more work is needed to understand long COVID’s symptoms in the youngest patients and to develop effective treatment protocols, the latest findings leave no doubt that long COVID in children is real. Some children are severely affected; they are not faking it or making it up.