Olga Charnaya, M.D., assistant professor of pediatrics, and Ryan Handoko, M.D., a resident in the Department of Pediatrics, are among the school of medicine researchers who investigated whether underlying chronic illness, along with age and obesity, could increase the potential for severe COVID-19 among pediatric patients.
My name is Ryan Hindalco from the pediatrics resident at the johNS Hopkins Children's Center and I'm presenting on pre existing chronic illness as a risk factor for pediatric covid 19 disease severity, which will be presented at the pediatric academic societies meeting. This has been work that I've been doing with DR over Sarnia and we've been looking at Children who have been hospitalized with COVID-19. And among those, those who have a particularly severe hospitalization course. Now, not many Children have to be hospitalized when they get Covid, but some of them do. And of those, some of them unfortunately have a rather bad hospitalization course. And we're interested in trying to see whether we can figure out what are the commonalities between Children who have to be hospitalized and Children have a really bad hospitalization course. Those who require extra oxygen support and you may have to be intubated or may have to receive intensive medical care. So we've taken a look at the data across johNS Hopkins institutions and we've been able to identify some patterns. Some Children who have to be hospitalized. They tend to be more likely to have chronic disease. In particular. We've identified which chronic diseases, right? They tend to be higher risk factors for severe covid and these can be chronic GI or gastrointestinal disease, chronic lung disease, congenital anomalies or genetic conditions, cardiovascular disease or congenital heart disease. Younger Children in our study seemed to have higher risk of developing severe Covid, more common conditions like asthma or obesity have been very people have been very interested in and taking a look at whether those sort of common conditions are also risk factors for covid. And in our study they weren't, which is helpful to contribute to the literature. And some data has suggested that has been obesity might be risk factors, some haven't. And so having another set of data to contribute to answering this question can help move the field forward. And in the end we just want to be able to help recognize what are the commonalities, What are the risk factors that some Children might have if they if they do contract covid and whether they have risk of being hospitalized or have to have a severe hospitalization. I'd like to thank Dr Olga Shania, who's been my wonderful mentor in the department of pediatric nephrology and we also have some fantastic collaborators. And dr Teresa Cheng, Dr six Samuels Dr Doug mobile, proper Dorry Segev and Dr Jacqueline Berenson going