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Earlier this month, an 11-year-old girl became the first known pediatric patient to have COVID-19-induced brain nerve damage in India. Hindustan Times broke the story on Monday, 19 October 2020.
The girl, who was admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi with blurred vision, has now been discharged from the hospital. AIIMS doctors told the media that they would be writing up a case study on her as her condition was a "new manifestation" of the novel coronavirus infection that has made 7.6 million Indians sick so far.
Reportedly, a draft of the case study says: “We have found Covid-19 infection-induced Acute Demyelinating Syndrome in an 11-year-old girl… This is the first case that has been reported in the paediatric age group.”
Acute demyelinating syndrome (ADS) is a sudden onset condition in which there is damage to the myelin sheath that covers and protects our nerves. ADS belongs to a class of demyelinating disorders in which damage to the protective layer of these nerves can also affect eyesight and other sensory perceptions, movement, and control over the bladder and bowel. Viruses and inflammation are some of the known causes of demyelinating disorders. A well-known example of such a disorder is multiple sclerosis.
In the case of this 11-year-old, the doctors at AIIMS found signs of nerve damage in her brain MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). Once they had made their diagnosis of COVID-linked ADS, the doctors were able to treat the girl and partially restore her vision with immunotherapy before discharging her.
While the neurological symptoms of COVID-19, like loss of smell and taste, difficulty concentrating and even psychosis, have been known for a while now, doctors are now discovering ways in which the infection is causing brain and nerve damage in children as well as older patients.
In an article in The Lancet Neurology, a peer-reviewed journal, published online in July 2020, researchers reported the following brain and nerve conditions in COVID-19 patients: ischaemic stroke, intracerebral haemorrhages, CNS vasculitis and other cerebrovascular events. They also found evidence of encephalopathy, including hypoxic encephalopathy, encephalitis and Guillain-Barré syndrome.
