Kawasaki disease or Kawasaki‐like disease: influence of SARS‐CoV‐2 infections in Japan

Iio, Kazuki; Uda, Kazuhiro; Hataya, Hiroshi; Yasui, Fumihiko; Honda, Tomoko; Sanada, Takahiro; Yamaji, Kenzaburo; Kohara, Michinori; Itokawa, Masanari; Miura, Masaru

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic witnessed several clusters of children with fever and multisystem inflammation resembling Kawasaki disease (KD). Due to the evidence of a preceding severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) infection in most of these patients, post‐viral immunological reactions were thought to play an important role in the pathogenesis.(1,2) The condition, called “pediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome temporally associated with SARS‐CoV‐2 infection (PIMS‐TS)”, has thus far been reported mainly from Europe and the United States,(1,2) and no cases have been diagnosed in Asia. We herein analyzed the clinical data on patients in whom KD was diagnosed during a local COVID‐19 epidemic to investigate the relationship between KD and SARS‐CoV‐2 infections in Japan, which has the highest KD incidence in the world.