The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has discovered a new COVID-19 syndrome in adults that is related to a multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). The new complex symptoms of disease in adults has been named a multisystem inflammatory syndrome in adults (MIS-A). The syndrome in either children or adults manifests like COVID-19 but without the tell-tale symptoms of coronaviruses.
CDC researchers said both MIS-C and MIS-A are not related to COVID-19 in any way and the symptoms displayed may not even be indicative of COVID-19, making the syndrome as equally dangerous and fatal as the coronavirus. The problem however is that MIS-A attacks racial and minority groups like coronavirus are wont to do, and at least three people have died from the syndrome.
The CDC states that thousands of children around the globe are infected with MIS-C and they usually recover if treated in time. Sometimes it affects children that had had COVID-19 recently and had recovered from it. While blood and antibody tests for MIS-C may indicate that a patient had recently recovered from COVID-19, they do not indicate the normal symptoms associated with COVID-19.
According to the CDC, about 27 people aged 21-50 have been diagnosed with MIS-A, and they all suffered terrible inflammation and organ malfunctions that excluded the lungs. It seems however that symptomatic MIS-A patients exhibit all the symptoms associated with COVID-19 except for respiratory failure, CDC said.
“Although hyper inflammation and extrapulmonary organ dysfunction have been described in hospitalized adults with severe COVID-19, these conditions are generally accompanied by respiratory failure,” CDC wrote. “In contrast, the patients described here had minimal respiratory symptoms, hypoxemia (low blood oxygen), or radiographic abnormalities in accordance with the working case definition.”
A third of the 27 MIS-A patients do not presently have coronavirus but antibody tests revealed they had it in the past but recovered from it. Only one of the 27 patients is white, the remaining 26 are racial and ethnic minority groups. To this end, the CDC advised clinicians to test whether patients had COVID-19 in the past before treating them for MIS-A.
“Clinicians and health departments should consider MIS-A in adults with compatible signs and symptoms,” CDC wrote. “These patients might not have positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR or antigen test results, and antibody testing might be needed to confirm previous SARS-CoV-2 infection.”
However, some of the MIS-A symptoms to look out for include fever, irregular heartbeats, heart problems, skin rashes, and gastrointestinal issues; it is also good to conduct X-rays to reveal inflammations of the lungs even if the patients do not exhibit any such signs, the CDC advised.
Source: cnn.com
