Syndrome in Children Thought to Only Be Caused by COVID-19 Actually Predates Pandemic: Study
Multisystem inflammatory syndrome was said to have a single cause, but researchers found cases with matching characteristics before the COVID-19 pandemic began.
A syndrome that manifests in some children after COVID-19 predates the pandemic, a group of researchers found.
Multisystemic inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) has a specific immune signature that differentiates it from similar illnesses such as Kawasaki’s disease. Many doctors said it was a new condition that was only caused by COVID-19.
But a group of doctors, reviewing cases from a French hospital, discovered multiple instances of children MIS-C symptoms and the immune signature from 2018 or earlier.
The pandemic did not start until 2020.
“The original findings of this research are that MIS-C (a disease initially considered as a new syndrome in April / May 2020) is a post infectious syndrome that already exists before the COVID-19,” Dr. Alexandre Belot, one of the researchers, told The Epoch Times in an email.
Newly Discovered Cases
Dr. Belot and other doctors from Hospices Civils de Lyon, with help from researchers from the Netherlands, Qatar, and the United States, examined pre-pandemic hospitalizations at the hospital. They looked for children who were admitted to intensive care between 2006 and 2018 for shock with hypertension and inflammation. They then reviewed those cases for the immune signature, a specific type of T cell receptor expansion, that has previously been identified as occurring in MIS-C cases.
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“We were surprised to find the MIS-C marker in three children,” Dr. Belot said.
A review of their cases showed the children had symptoms exactly matching the presentation of MIS-C following COVID-19. None of the children had definitive diagnoses previously.
Testing of serum from one of the children showed antibodies against 18 pathogens, including coronaviruses.
A fourth child who had the MIS-C marker during the pandemic tested negative for COVID-19.
Further Exploration
Based on the findings, the researchers examined a Dutch cohort of four children who were diagnosed with Kawasaki’s disease, which has similar symptoms but which has been differentiated from MIS-C through, in part, the immune signature.
The researchers found the signature in one patient and other markers in both. They concluded those two children, who were seen in 2013 and 2017, respectively, also had MIS-C.
“The clinical, biologic, and immunologic features that we observed in these prepandemic and SARS-CoV-2–negative patients are indistinguishable from those seen in patients with MIS-C,” the authors wrote. “Rarely seen before the COVID-19 pandemic, this syndrome was not individualized and was reported as atypical.”
Five of the six children were male, while the mean age was 5.
None of the children experienced a recurrence of MIS-C in the years that have elapsed since they were diagnosed, and none showed “notable symptoms” during the pandemic, according to the researchers.
All of the study’s authors said they had no conflicts of interest.
Funding came from many sources, including Hospices Civils de Lyon, the French government, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Disrupts Narrative
The findings disrupt the widespread belief among many doctors that MIS-C was a new condition that had only one cause.
The Mayo Clinic, for instance, says on its website that MIS-C “was first detected in April 2020.”
The Yale School of Medicine says MIS-C “is an inflammatory response to infection by SARS-CoV-2,” or the virus that causes COVID-19.
The MIS-C case definition from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists requires detection of COVID-19 in the patient or the patient being in close contact with a confirmed or probable case of COVID-19 in the two months before being hospitalized.
Vaccine proponents such as the CDC have promoted vaccination as a way to protect children against MIS-C, citing observational studies. “The best way to prevent MIS-C is to protect against getting SARS-CoV-2 infection, including staying up to date with COVID-19 vaccines and other prevention actions,” the CDC says on its website.
MIS-C can involve serious symptoms, such as difficulty breathing. Some patients have gone into shock with organ failure. A small number have died.
Treatments include intravenous immunoglobulin and corticosteroids.
Because COVID-19 case numbers have dropped dramatically since earlier peaks, the number of MIS-C cases has also dropped. In France, for example, cases are “very rare” at present, authors of the new study said.
Syndrome Can Be Caused by Vaccination?
Other research has suggested that multisystem inflammatory syndrome can be caused by COVID-19 vaccination.
A number of doctors have reported cases of vaccine recipients reporting to hospitals with MIS-C symptoms, using the diagnosis of multisystem inflammatory syndrome following COVID-19 vaccination (MIS-V).
British doctors, for instance, reported a 44-year-old patient that they said represented “the first reported MIS-V case after the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.”
