Researchers at the University of California San Diego of Medicine and Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego joined a $1.15 billion, four-year nationwide study to understand the long-term impact of COVID-19 on patients.
The study called the Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative, is sponsored by the National Institute of Health (NIH). More than 30 research teams across the country will be supported by over $448 million in funding from the NIH.
According to UC San Diego, researchers will share data in real-time, providing the scale necessary to develop information and answers as quickly as possible. Researchers say the purpose of the study is “to better understand post-acute sequelae of the SARS-CoV-2” infections or PASC, more commonly known as ‘long-COVID”.
“Our goal is to better understand the disease so we can develop effective treatments and prevention strategies for the community,” added Kyung (Kay) Rhee, MD, professor and chief of the Division of Child and Community Health at UC San Diego School of Medicine and the Department of Pediatrics at Rady Children’s.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, more than 90 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported in the nation since 2020. Current data suggests that about 10 to 30 percent of those who have an acute infection will experience persistent symptoms lasting at least one month.
Symptoms of Long-COVID include pain, headaches, fatigue, “brain fog,” shortness of breath, anxiety, depression, fever, chronic cough, and sleep problems. Experts say long-COVID occurs when symptoms persist for weeks or months after acute COVID-19 infection.
Preliminary data suggests PASC may disproportionately affect certain socioeconomic and demographic groups, including groups that will be represented within the UC San Diego/Rady study, according to a news release. The pediatric cohort study at UC San Diego/Rady is called PEDS-PASS (Pediatric Epidemiology and Disparities Study of Post-Acute SARS-CoV-2).
Researchers will evaluate how often long-COVID occurs within the community following acute infection and follow the natural history of and risk factors for PASC over several years in newborns, children, and young adults.
Those who will enroll in the study will be patients with or without COVID-19 and patients with varying stages of long-COVID. The patients will also participate in a long-term follow-up.
Up to 20,000 participants may enroll in the nationwide study, and 20,000 caregivers. Researchers say the study will include 800 children with MIS-C and 200 children and young adults with a history of post-COVID vaccine-associated myocarditis or inflammation of the heart muscle.
For more information, visit www.rchsd.org/research/clinical-trials/recover-researching-covid-to-enhance-recovery or email pulmresearch@rchsd.org.
