Exploring the causes of mild COVID-19 involvement in pediatric patients

Naserghandi, Alvand; Saffarpour, Reyhaneh; Allameh, Seyed Farshad

Abstract In December 2019, emergence of a novel coronavirus, which rapidly turned into a pandemic, posed a public health threat of global concern that has had a huge impact on the health of millions of people around the world. Existing evidence indicates relatively low incidence and mild severity of COVID-19 in children as compared to adults. Although the precise underlying reasons for such disparity remain obscure. The article provides general information about the COVID-19 and epidemiological data of the disease in children and their clinical manifestations and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). The main aim of this article is to exploring the reasons given for the mildness of the disease in pediatric patients. Several theories related to immunosenescence, vaccination and trained immunity, coinfection, ACE-2 maturation and expression, viral exposure, overall health and smoking have been proposed so far in recent literature. However, due to the newfound of this virus and lack of information about it, these reasons are not conclusive, but these points are considered as possible reasons for the low prevalence and mildness of the disease in pediatric patients.