The Immunology of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children with COVID-19

By C. Consiglio, N. Cotugno, F. Sardh, Christian Pou, D. Amodio, L. Rodriguez, Ziyang Tan, S. Zicari, A. Ruggiero, G. Pascucci and 13 more. medRxiv, 2020

773 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SARS-CoV2 infection is typically very mild and often asymptomatic in children. A complication is the rare Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) associated with COVID-19, presenting 4-6 weeks after infection as high fever and organ dysfunction and strongly elevated markers of inflammation. The pathogenesis is unclear but has overlapping features with Kawasaki disease suggestive of vasculitis and a likely autoimmune etiology. We apply systems-level analyses of blood immune cells, cytokines and autoantibodies in healthy children, children with Kawasaki disease enrolled prior to COVID-19, children infected with SARS-CoV2 and children presenting with MIS-C. We find that the inflammatory response in MIS-C differs from the cytokine storm of severe acute COVID-19, is more similar to Kawasaki disease, but also differ from this with respect to T-cell subsets, IL-17A and biomarkers associated with arterial damage. Finally, autoantibody profiling suggests endoglin, an endothelial glycoprotein as one of several candidate targets of autoantibodies in MIS-C.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Surgery

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bfeaae68ea4b4fd1dda7f1725af573994c584d89

Citations in the corpus