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A Finding You May Not Have Thought About in Children with Kawasaki Disease :

November 15, 2019

If you were asked to name a complication of Kawasaki Disease (KD), you would probably go with coronary artery aneurysms (CAA), and that would be correct.

If you were asked to name a complication of Kawasaki Disease (KD), you would probably go with coronary artery aneurysms (CAA), and that would be correct. But have you ever thought that aneurysms might be occurring elsewhere in the vascular system as well? Zhao et al (10.1542/peds.2019-2254) studied whether systemic artery aneurysms (SAA) are associated in children with KD. The authors screened 162 patients with KD and CAAs with magnetic resonance angiography or peripheral angiography and found that 23 patients or 14.2% had SAAs and overall 23 of 1,148 patients or an estimated 2% of all patients in this study had SAAs at 1 month after onset of the disease. Where were these SAAs located? In this study, they were found most commonly in axillary (18.6%), common iliac (12.4%) and brachial (11.6%) arteries. In fact, 17 different arteries showed evidence of aneurysms. The good news is that the regression rate over time for the larger SAAs was better than for larger CAAs. Why might these be occurring and when should you consider looking for them are questions that should prompt you to want to read this study and learn more. SAAs are not something you might have considered in your patients with KD but after getting to the heart of the findings reported in this study, you may have to add these to the complication list of this fascinating and still somewhat unexplained illness. Link to this study and learn more.

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