Nutritional Advice El Mondo
Objectives:
Clinical symptoms of adults and paediatric inpatients with COVID-19 disease are conflicting. Therefore, this review article has been conducted.
What is the effect of age on the severity in COVID-19 inpatients?
Study design:
This review article included 5 studies with 910 inpatients with COVID-19 disease at the baseline of the study. 773 of them were adult inpatients and 137 of them were paediatric inpatients (infants, children and adolescents).
Results and conclusions:
The investigators found, compared with children, adults with COVID-19 disease had significantly lower number of mild cases [OR = 0.18, 95% CI = 0.04 to 0.77, p = 0.02], higher number severe cases [OR = 4.90, 95% CI = 2.03 to 11.83, p 0.001], higher number of cases with fever [OR = 4.14, 95% CI = 2.31 to 7.43, p 0.001] and higher number of cases with CT positive COVID-19 disease [OR = 2.04, 95% CI = 1.17 to 3.55, p = 0.001].
The investigators found, however, no significant difference between adults and children in number of cases with shortness of breath [OR = 1.44, 95% CI = 0.41 to 5.04, p = 0.57], dry cough [OR = 1.77, 95% CI = 0.64 to 4.93, p = 0.27] leukopenia [OR = 0.89, 95% CI = 0.47 to 1.66, p = 0.71], lymphopenia [OR = 0.96, 95% CI = 0.49 to 1.88, p = 0.91], high platelets [OR = 0.41, 95% CI = 0.17 to 1.02, p = 0.05] and high D-dimer [OR = 0.82, 95% CI = 0.43 to 1.56, p = 0.54].
The investigators concluded that adults with COVID-19 disease have a much higher level of symptomatic severity, fever and CT-positive COVID-19 disease than children. However, the laboratory data are similar in both groups.
Original title:
Effect of age of COVID-19 inpatient on the severity of the disease: A meta-analysis by Chai S, Li Y, […], Xu X.
Link:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34309989/
Additional information of El Mondo:
Find more information/studies on coronavirus right here.