MIS-C, a rare but serious disease associated with COVID-19

Abstract

COVID-19 disease began in December 2019, becoming known as a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020. The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention issues alert on an acute multisystem inflammatory illness in children, and called it Pediatric Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome temporally associated with SARS-CoV-2 or MIS-C. It manifests in children and adolescents between 0 and 19 years of age, who also present fever for more than 3 days, marked elevation of acute phase reactants, associated with mucocutaneous inflammation, hypotension or shock, cardiac dysfunction, coagulopathies, or acute gastrointestinal symptoms. The diagnosis of this pathology is made through clinical history, symptomatology, and laboratory changes. It presents similar characteristics to other diseases with inflammatory processes such as Kawasaki disease, toxic shock syndrome, and macrophage activation syndrome or hemophagocytic syndrome. The appropriate management is unknown, but several treatments have been proposed that have shown improvement of the clinical picture of patients, such as the administration of intravenous immunoglobulins, corticosteroids and aspirin, among other specific treatments.