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A healthcare worker administers a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine to a teenager at Holtz Children’s Hospital in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Wednesday, May 18, 2021. Coronavirus cases in the U.S. increased 0.1% as compared to the same time yesterday to 33 million, as of 5:49 a.m. New York time, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg News. Photographer: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
By Maggie Fox, CNN
By Maggie Fox, CNN
June 17, 2021
The teenaged boys all looked like they were having heart attacks.
They complained of chest pain and general discomfort, and tests looked at first as if they were suffering an acute myocardial infarction, or heart attack.
But they weren’t. Instead, the seven youths ages 14 to 19 were suffering from a very rare type of heart inflammation. It’s one that public health officials are beginning to link to Covid-19 vaccines.
“Fortunately, none of our patients were critically ill and all of them responded very quickly to treatment,” Dr. Judith Guzman-Cottrill of Oregon Health & Science University told a meeting of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee Thursday.
While all the young patients were hospitalized for cardiac monitoring because of their symptoms, they quickly recovered.
Guzman-Cottrill said she believes the heart inflammation, called myocarditis, might be a result of a very rare reaction to the coronavirus vaccine. All seven patients had been recently vaccinated, and none had evidence of a recent coronavirus infection.
Children and teens appear to have stronger immediate reactions to the vaccine than adults do, she noted. These reactions, widely reported, include fever, malaise and headache. Inflammation of the heart may be a more extreme manifestation of this response, Guzman-Cottrill said.
“I am wondering if myocarditis is actually an additional rare adverse event related to systemic reactogenicity and/or immunogenicity and these younger patients just tend to have more reactogenicity compared to older populations — and more severe reactogenicity,” she told the NVAC meeting.
NVAC advises the US Health and Human Services Department and asked Guzman-Cottrill to describe findings she reported June 1 in the journal Pediatrics.
The seven youths had chest pain, fever and other symptoms and test results looked like those seen in people having acute myocardial infarctions — the technical term for a heart attack. But none of the teenagers was having a heart attack.
The patients all were better within days. Different treatments were tried, including aspirin, ibuprofen and steroids.
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