Plasma Therapy Safe in Children With COVID-19

Convalescent plasma appears to be safe and effective in treating children with life-threatening cases of COVID-19.

The findings are from a small study conducted at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and the results are published online in the journal Pediatric Blood and Cancer.

Coronavirus
Coronaviruses infect animals, humans, and birds. Human coronaviruses, such as SARS, MERS, and 2019-nCoV cause respiratory distress and even death. The S protein is the infectious agent of the virus.

‘Convalescent plasma using plasma from recovering COVID-19 patients, is a safe and effective therapy for children suffering from severe respiratory illness in COVID-19 infection.’
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Convalescent plasma therapy has shown positive results in adults suffering from COVID-19 infection. It involves the use of plasma from patients who have recovered from COVID-19. This is administered to ill patients during the initial stages of the disease to generate an antibody response.

This possibility was explored in children for whom no therapies have been proven safe and effective.

"Some children who contract this virus can develop very serious complications, so even with limited data in adults, we believed it was worth exploring the use of convalescent plasma as a possible treatment option," said David Teachey, MD, senior author of the study and an attending physician, Co-Leader of the Immune Dysregulation Frontier Program, and Director of Clinical Research at the Center for Childhood Cancer Research at CHOP.

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The study involved four pediatric patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome. The donor antibody levels and recipient antibody response were measured prior to and following the convalescent plasma infusion to assess any adverse reaction.

The results showed that the use of convalescent plasma did not cause antibody-dependent enhancement. This is a condition in which antibodies developed during a previous infection worsened the immune response in subsequent infections. The results also showed that convalescent plasma did not suppress endogenous antibody response.

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"We believe that convalescent plasma may provide the greatest benefit for patients who are early into their illness and have not yet generated endogenous antibodies," Teachey said. "While the small sample size of our study does not allow us to draw any definitive conclusions, we believe this method is safe, and future research should include randomized controlled trials to more definitively examine how effective convalescent plasma may be in treating children infected with COVID-19."

Source-Medindia

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