Rao, Suchitra, Gross, Rachel S, Mohandas, Sindhu et al. · Pediatrics · 2024 · DOI
Some children who have COVID-19 experience symptoms that last for weeks or months after the initial infection—a condition called long COVID. This review summarizes what we currently know about long COVID in children, including how common it is, what symptoms children experience, and what might cause it. The authors also describe major research efforts being funded to better understand long COVID in young people and find effective treatments.
This review is significant for ME/CFS research because it documents that myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome is now recognized as a condition that can develop de novo following SARS-CoV-2 infection in children. Understanding long COVID mechanisms may illuminate similar pathophysiological processes in ME/CFS, including viral triggers, immune dysregulation, and post-infectious sequelae. The described research infrastructure and multi-system approach may inform better study designs for investigating post-infectious ME/CFS.
This review does not establish causal mechanisms for long COVID or ME/CFS—it summarizes emerging evidence and identifies areas needing investigation. It does not provide definitive prevalence estimates across populations, as data collection methods and case definitions remain inconsistent across studies. The review cannot determine which children are at highest risk of developing long COVID or which specific interventions are most effective, as these remain open research questions.
About the PEM badge: “PEM required” means post-exertional malaise was an explicit required diagnostic criterion for participant inclusion in this study — not that PEM was studied, observed, or discussed. Studies using criteria that do not require PEM (e.g. Fukuda, Oxford) are tagged “PEM not required”. How the atlas works →
The first block is for the primary paper and is the citation you should use in research work. The atlas-snapshot line only applies if you are specifically referring to this atlas’s reading of the paper on the date shown.
Primary citation
Rao, Suchitra, Gross, Rachel S, Mohandas, Sindhu, Stein, Cheryl R, Case, Abigail, Dreyer, Benard, et al. (2024). Postacute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 in Children.. Pediatrics. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2023-062570
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-rao-2024-postacute-sequelae,
author = {Rao, Suchitra and Gross, Rachel S and Mohandas, Sindhu and Stein, Cheryl R and Case, Abigail and Dreyer, Benard and Pajor, Nathan M and Bunnell, H Timothy and Warburton, David and Berg, Elizabeth and Overdevest, Jonathan B and Gorelik, Mark and Milner, Joshua and Saxena, Sejal and Jhaveri, Ravi and Wood, John C and Rhee, Kyung E and Letts, Rebecca and Maughan, Christine and Guthe, Nick and Castro-Baucom, Leah and Stockwell, Melissa S},
title = {Postacute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 in Children.},
journal = {Pediatrics},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1542/peds.2023-062570},
note = {PubMed: 38321938},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/rao-2024-postacute-sequelae},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-28. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/rao-2024-postacute-sequelae
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