Identification of COVID-19–Associated Hepatitis in Children as an Emerging Complication in the Wake of SARS-CoV-2 Infections: Ambispective Observational Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Although the pediatric population has largely remained free of severe COVID-19 symptoms, in some cases, SARS-CoV-2 infection has been associated with complications such as multiple inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). We identified another a unique form of hepatitis occurring subsequent to asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, designated by us as COVID-19-associated hepatitis in children (CAH-C), in a subset of children who presented with hepatitis. Objective: Our study describes the clinical presentations, temporal association, and viral parameters of the CAH-C cases and compares them to those of MIS-C cases or other known forms of hepatitis in children. Methods: In an ambispective (retrospective and follow-up) observational study, records from April to July 2021 were reviewed for all children aged ≤14 years who were previously healthy and presented with a sudden onset of hepatitis, elevated transaminases, and nonobstructive jaundice. After performing all routine tests, those lacking marked inflammatory responses and without evidence of (1) other known causes of acute hepatitis or previous underlying liver disease and (2) multisystem involvement were classified as having CAH-C. Their characteristics were compared to those of children with MIS-C or other known forms of hepatitis. Results: Among the 5539 children tested for SARS-CoV-2, a total of 475 (8.6%) tested positive and 47 (0.8%) presented with hepatitis. Among the 47 children with hepatitis, 37 (79%) had features of CAH-C: having symptoms of hepatitis only, without protracted illness (mean length of stay 5 d), and an uneventful recovery following supportive treatment. In contrast, the remaining 10 (21%) had features of MIS-C-associated hepatitis: multiple system involvement; protracted illness (mean length of stay 8 d); and requiring admission to critical care, with a mortality rate of 30% (3/10). Conclusions: Our data suggest that CAH-C might be one of the new clinical complications associated with the emergence of newer variants of concern of SARS-CoV-2, which often result in changing presentations. Our findings should facilitate its early identification and thorough workup and aid its differentiation from other emerging syndromes in children, which would help initiate appropriate measures, enable better resource prioritization, and thus limit adversities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".