The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a research effort to understand why some children are at greater risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection than others, why symptoms vary among children who are infected and how to identify children at risk for severe illness from SARS-CoV-2 infection, including multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C).
The Collaboration to Assess Risk and Identify Long-term Outcomes for Children with COVID (CARING for Children with COVID) program, https://caring4kidswithcovid.nih.gov, includes three clinical networks with sites across the country.
- The Long-Term Outcomes after MIS-C Network study is focused on cardiovascular complications of MIS-C and collects data on all aspects of childhood and adolescent health in affected participants.
- The Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics and Safety Profile of Understudied Drugs Administered to Children per Standard of Care study focuses on understanding the treatment of children diagnosed with COVID-19 or MIS-C with medicines that have shown promise in adults.
- The Pediatric Research Immune Network on SARS-CoV-2 and MIS-C study aims to evaluate the short- and long-term health outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 infection in children, including MIS-C, and characterize immunologic pathways associated with different disease presentations and outcomes.
Data will be collected on a core set of health measures and will be made available on NIH web platforms so researchers can conduct additional analyses and make more discoveries.
A research funding program also was created to encourage the development of nontraditional approaches that identify children at high risk for developing MIS-C.
