AB1144 COGNITIVE AND PSYCHOSOCIAL OUTCOME IN CHILDREN WITH MULTISYSTEM INFLAMMATORY SYNDROME FOLLOWING SARS-CoV-2 INFECTION

Abstract

BackgroundDespite the low rate of neurological deficits following the SARS-COV-2 infection in the pediatric population, children and adolescents who develop multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) after being infected with SARS-COV-2 are at a higher risk for neurological abnormalities and brain injury, increasing the risk of adverse cognitive and psychiatric outcome.ObjectivesGiven the increased risk of central nervous system impairment we chose to conduct a prospective study looking at the cognitive and psychosocial outcome of patients with MIS-C.MethodsOur study included 27 of the 29 patients between 2 to 18 years of age (M = 11.1, SD = 4.4) who were treated for MIS-C from the onset of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic until the beginning of May 2021 at the only tertiary care pediatric immunology center in Slovenia. We assessed these patients 6 months after diagnosis using the age-appropriate Wechsler intelligence scales and a battery of neuropsychological test measuring attention, executive function, memory and fine motor skills. We also asked parents to report on patients’ psychosocial outcome using the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist.ResultsBy using Bayesian statistics to take into account parental education and any potential pre-morbid learning difficulties we found no evidence of impairment on measures of intelligence. However, the posterior distribution of scores on neuropsychological measures indicated that a significant proportion of patients scored 1SD bellow expected levels on measures of attention (31%), executive function (28%) and visual memory (35%). Increased symptoms of depression, anxiety and attention difficulties were also reported by parents, although their extent did not rise to a clinically significant level.ConclusionThe findings from our cohort suggest that the cognitive and psychosocial outcome of patients with MIS-C is generally favorable, although up to 35% may experience specific neuropsychological deficits more than 6 months after diagnosis. The most commonly impaired cognitive domains seem to be attention, executive function and visual memory.AcknowledgementsFunding for this work was provided by the Slovenian Research Agency grant J3-3061 and University Medical Centre grant 20210069. Support was also provided by Dušica Boben and the publisher Center za psihodiagnostična sredstva by providing the local adaptations of psychological assessment tools.Disclosure of InterestsDavid Gosar Speakers bureau: Biogen, Novartis, Mojca Zajc Avramovič: None declared, Nina Emersic: None declared, Mateja Šušterič: None declared, Maja Maša Šömen: None declared, Damjan Osredkar: None declared, Tadej Avcin: None declared