Evaluation of steroids for acute COVID in the prevention of long COVID in children: An EHR and pediatric cohort study from the RECOVER Initiative.

BACKGROUND

Studies have shown that use of immunomodulators during the acute phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection may decrease development of post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC) or long COVID; however, such studies have not been conducted in children.

OBJECTIVE

Evaluate the effectiveness of steroid use during the acute phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection in preventing long COVID in children.

METHODS

We conducted a retrospective cohort study using target trial emulation methodology to compare children and youth who did and did not receive dexamethasone, prednisone, prednisolone or methylprednisolone within 12 days of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Inverse propensity of treatment weighting was used to balance covariates between treated and untreated patients in hospitalized and outpatient groups. The primary outcome was the development of PASC in the 1-6 months following acute infection using a computable phenotype definition. Secondary outcomes included respiratory, musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal and neurological subphenotypes and the PASC ICD-10-CM diagnosis code. We calculated hazard ratios from Cox proportional models with 95% confidence intervals.

RESULTS

From a starting cohort of 854,128 children/youth, of whom 768,845 (90.0%) were outpatients and 85,283 (10.0%) were inpatients at the time of SARS-CoV-2 infection, the weighted outpatient cohort included 22,085 steroid-treated children and 20,373 in the non-steroid group. Following weighting, the hospitalized cohort included 11,250 steroid-treated children and 10,340 untreated children. In hospitalized patients, there were no significant treatment differences in the development of PASC in the 1-6 months following acute SARS-CoV-2 infection except for a lower risk of gastrointestinal PASC in treated patients (HR: 0.58; [95% CI: 0.39-0.85], p = 0.01). In outpatients, no treatment differences were observed in the development of PASC subphenotypes.

CONCLUSIONS

Steroids administered during acute SARS-CoV-2 infection did not lead to a decreased risk of PASC, with the exception of gastrointestinal presentations. Additional studies are needed to confirm the benefit of steroids and other immunomodulators in preventing long COVID.