Blood clots, heart problems, kidney failure: COVID creates a higher risk for rare pediatric health problems, new CDC study finds
Fortune (Aug. 4, 2022) – Researchers with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examined the electronic health records of nearly 800,000 U.S. children ages 0 through 17 who had COVID from 2020 through 2022, and compared them with that of nearly 2.5 million children who had not been diagnosed with COVID during the same time period.
They found that young people who had been diagnosed with COVID were about two times more likely to experience a blood clot in the lung—and nearly two times 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 1.3 times as likely to experience kidney failure, as well as Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disorder that destroys the pancreas’s ability to make insulin, according to the study.