“At Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, we care for probably one of the largest populations of MIS-C patients in the country,” says Andrew Cheng, MD, a pediatric cardiologist at CHLA and co-senior author on the study. “We wanted to find out if there were any lingering cardiac effects in children treated for MIS-C, given that some of them were so ill they needed to be admitted to the intensive care unit, but then went on to make what looked like a complete clinical recovery,” says Jackie Szmuszkovicz, MD, a pediatric cardiologist at CHLA, Medical Director of the hospital’s Kawasaki Disease Program and co-senior author on the study.Īlthough other centers have focused their follow-up studies on patients who had evidence of cardiac complications during the acute phase of the disease, investigators at CHLA opted to include all patients who returned for follow-up-whether or not they had experienced cardiac injury during hospitalization.

Results of the study have been published in the journal Pediatrics. Also, the proportion of abnormal findings was not significantly different between patients who experienced cardiac injury during their hospitalization compared with patients who did not have overt cardiac complications during their hospitalization.

They found that many patients with MIS-C had abnormal findings on at least one cardiac study at their 6-month follow-up. Investigators at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles analyzed results of follow-up cardiac studies for all children who had been hospitalized at CHLA for MIS-C. During the acute phase of the disease, some patients experience acute cardiac injury, while others do not. MIS-C is a serious, potentially life-threatening illness that results in inflammation, with the cardiovascular system frequently affected. In the U.S., nearly 10,000 children and adolescents have developed a condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C, following COVID-19 infection. Investigators at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Find Heart Complications in Many Children Treated for MIS-CĪ cardiac follow-up is recommended for all children who have been treated for MIS-C.

Phase 10 for kids