Pediatricians report it affects on average 0.5% of children who got the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that caused COVID-19. It has a few names, like Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, but Long Covid is the common term, and is generally characterized as persistence of COVID-19 symptoms 12 weeks or more weeks after the disease.
To aid in diagnosis, a team reports the molecular signature of Long Covid in plasma in children using an LLM "AI" tool capable of making the diagnosis based on the results of the blood sample. The team reports 93% accuracy. The work was derived from the blood of 112 young people aged 0-19 years, 34 of whom had a clinical diagnosis of Long COVID and 32 with an active infection at the time of the study, 27 had Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome (MIS-C, a hyper-inflammatory reaction that almost always requires intensive care) and 19 were healthy control peers.

Pediatric Long COVID was characterized by a higher presence in plasma of the pro-inflammatory and pro-angiogenic chemokine sets CXCL11, CXCL1, CXCL5, CXCL6, CXCL8, TNFSF11, OSM, STAMBP1a. This 'sign' had already been found in the blood of adults but had not been done for children.
The teams AI model based on proteomic profiling was identified Long Covid with an accuracy of 0.93, a specificity of 0.86 and a sensitivity of 0.97. The authors conclude that Long Covid is an organic immune-mediated disease and researchers should begin to focus on therapeutic approaches, but this remains an observational study and will need validation.
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