Arkansas Children’s Research Institute of Little Rock will be a key partner in a 14-state consortium focused on long-haul COVID-19 in children, part of a nationwide research effort funded by the National Institutes of Health, ACRI announced Tuesday.
ACRI received an estimated $25 million from NIH to fund the research. The project will help scientists better understand the long-term impacts of COVID-19 on children across the nation, ACRI said in a news release. That research could eventually lead to more effective treatments for children with COVID-19.
“We’ll be looking not only at children’s hospitalizations and studying their pneumonia, but also examining the long-term impacts on their hearts, on their lungs, on their development and their ability to regulate hormones,” said Dr. Jessica Snowden, the research lead, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Arkansas Children’s and associate director for clinical and translational research at Arkansas Children’s Research Institute. “We don’t know yet just how many problems arise because of COVID long-term. We’ll be figuring out what causes these problems and how we can prevent them.”
Snowden is also a professor and chief of the division of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences College of Medicine in Little Rock. The study will use the work of scientists at both Arkansas Children’s and UAMS to examine the surveys of families whose children have been diagnosed with COVID-19.
ACRI will coordinate the 14 rural states as a pediatric arm of the research.
The National Institutes of Health awarded nearly $470 million to build the national study population of diverse research volunteers and support large-scale studies on the long-term effects of COVID-19.
The NIH Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery Initiative, called the RECOVER program, made the parent award to New York University Langone Health in New York, which will make multiple sub-awards to more than 100 researchers at more than 30 institutions and serves as the RECOVER Clinical Science Core.
The award supports new studies of COVID-19 survivors and uses existing long-running large cohort studies with an expansion of their research focus, the ACRI release said. This combined population of research participants from new and existing cohorts, called a meta-cohort, will comprise the RECOVER Cohort.
The funding was supported by the American Rescue Plan.
NIH launched the RECOVER Initiative to learn why some people have prolonged symptoms, referred to as long COVID, or develop new or returning symptoms after the acute phase of infection from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The most common symptoms include pain, headaches, fatigue, “brain fog,” shortness of breath, anxiety, depression, fever, chronic cough and sleep problems.
Data from the RECOVER Cohort will include clinical information, laboratory tests and analyses of participants in various stages of recovery following SARS-CoV-2 infection. With immediate access to data from existing, diverse study populations, it is anticipated researchers will be able to accelerate the timeline for the research.
Sign up for Daily E-news
