Tag Archive for: pediatric infectious diseases

Deer tick

Lyme disease: When will pediatric symptoms resolve?

Deer tick

Over a 13-year period that began in 2004, cases of illness transmitted by ticks, mosquitoes and fleas have more than tripled, the CDC found.

The summer of 2018 was a bad summer for Lyme disease, the tick-borne disease that was first documented in the 1970s in the town of Lyme, Connecticut. While about 30,000 cases of this disease had been reported annually in recent years, studies suggest that the actual number of infections is around 10 times greater.

And according to a study published May 2018 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), those case numbers may increase over time. Over a 13-year period that began in 2004, cases of illness transmitted by ticks, mosquitoes and fleas have more than tripled, the CDC found.

Lyme disease causes a host of uncomfortable symptoms, ranging from headache and neurological problems, heart problems and eye inflammation in earlier stages, and progressing to joint pain and arthritis in later stages. While it can be treated successfully with appropriate antibiotics, the timeframe for kids’ symptom resolution has been unclear.

A new study by researchers at Children’s National Health System shows that symptoms improve just days or weeks after starting antibiotic therapy for the vast majority of patients, with people whose symptoms had been present a briefer time improving the fastest.

“These findings offer a reassuring timeline for doctors, patients and their families about when patients with Lyme disease can expect to feel better,” says study Senior Author Roberta L. DeBiasi, M.D., MS, Children’s National’s chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases and co-director of the Congenital Zika Virus Program. Dr. DeBiasi was recently appointed to serve on a 52-member Tick-Borne Disease Working Group established in 2018 by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. DeBiasi and colleagues collected data retrospectively from the medical records of 78 patients who had been hospitalized at Children’s National for Lyme disease from 2008 to 2015. Each child, who was younger than 18 years old, had documented symptoms and lab tests conclusive for this disease.

Just under one-half had symptoms consistent with early-stage disease, such as:

  • A severe headache
  • Meningitis (inflammation of the membranes covering the brain)
  • Cranial nerve palsy (a nerve dysfunction that affects eye movement and can cause double vision)
  • Multiple erythema migrans rashes (the bulls-eye-shaped rash that’s a hallmark of Lyme disease) and
  • Pseudotumor cerebri (increased pressure inside the skull).

Just over one-half had symptoms consistent with late-stage disease, which mostly consisted of arthritis affecting the knees, along with the hips and elbows in some cases.

In the hospital, each patient was started on an antibiotic that can effectively treat Lyme, including doxycycline, cefotaxime or ceftriaxone, which they continued at home for the prescribed length of the course. The researchers then tracked how quickly the patients’ symptoms resolved.

They report online July 30, 2018, in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, that the time to symptom resolution for early stages of disease did not depend on the duration of symptoms prior to starting antibiotics. However, for later stages of disease, patients with longer duration of symptoms prior to starting treatment took longer for their symptoms to resolve.

For patients with early-stage disease, the most common symptom was headache; the median time to symptom resolution was just three days, no matter how long the headache had persisted before treatment started. However, for patients with late-stage Lyme disease, the median time to resolution was 18 days. However, the time depended largely on how long symptoms had persisted before patients began taking antibiotics. For example, patients who had experienced arthritis for less than one week had a shorter time to resolution than those who had arthritis for more than two weeks.

This finding is important, Dr. DeBiasi says, because it suggests that diagnosing Lyme disease earlier – and prescribing the appropriate therapy as soon as possible – can hasten recovery. The vast majority of patients in the study, she adds, eventually experienced full resolution of their symptoms, which should be comforting to families worried about whether their child will ever feel well again.

“We all want what patients and their families want: to feel better as quickly as possible,” Dr. DeBiasi says. “This study gives us valuable information about how soon that will happen given the duration of pediatric patients’ symptoms.”

Dr. DeBiasi and Children’s Psychologist Maureen Monaghan, Ph.D., are leading another Lyme study in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to evaluate symptom resolution, quality of life and neurocognitive outcomes in a larger group of pediatric patients with Lyme disease.

In addition to Dr. DeBiasi and Monaghan, Children’s co-authors include Lead Author Mattia E. Chason; Biostatistician Jichuan Wang, Ph.D.; and Yao Cheng.

Staphylococcus aureus

Understanding antibiotic resistance in patients with cystic fibrosis

Staphylococcus aureus

Patients with cystic fibrosis who carried antibiotic-resistant bacteria, such as Staphylococcus aureus, in their lungs had significantly lower microbial diversity and more aggressive disease, according to a small study published in Heliyon.

A defective gene causes thick, sticky mucus to build up in the lungs of patients with cystic fibrosis (CF). There, it traps bacteria, causing patients to develop frequent lung infections that progressively damage these vital organs and impair patients’ ability to breathe.

Most patients with this progressive genetic disorder die by the fourth decade of life. A key to helping patients live even that long – a vast improvement from an average lifespan of 10 years  just decades ago – is judicious use of antibiotics, explains Andrea Hahn, M.D., a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Children’s National Health System.

But antibiotics are a double-edged sword, Dr. Hahn adds: Although they’re necessary to eradicate lung infections, repeated use of these drugs can lead to antibiotic resistance, making it tougher to treat future infections. Also, antibiotic use can kill the nonpathogenic bacteria living in the lungs as well. That decreases the diversity of the microbial community that resides in the lungs, a factor associated with disease progression. But how antibiotic resistance impacts the relationship between lung bacterial diversity and CF patients’ pulmonary function has been unknown.

Dr. Hahn and colleagues investigated this question in a small study that was published online Sept. 17, 2018, in Heliyon. Their findings suggest that the presence of multidrug resistant bacteria in the airways of patients with CF is associated with decreased microbial diversity and decreased pulmonary function.

In the study, the researchers recruited six patients with CF from Children’s National during well-child visits. During those appointments, the research team collected respiratory secretions from these volunteers. They collected more samples at subsequent visits, including:

  • When patients were admitted to the hospital for pulmonary exacerbations (periods when infections inflamed their airways, making it difficult to breathe);
  • Just after intravenous antibiotic courses to treat these infections; and
  • Thirty days after patients completed antibiotic therapy, when their lungs’ bacterial flora had some time to bounce back.

Over the 18-month study period, these patients made multiple visits for exacerbations and antibiotic treatments, leading to samples from 19 patient encounters overall.

The scientists then analyzed each sample in two different ways. They used some to grow cultures in petri dishes, the classic method that labs use to figure out which bacterial species are present and to determine which antibiotics are effective in tamping them down. They used another part of the sample to run genetic analyses that searched for antibiotic resistance genes. Both methods were necessary to gather a complete inventory of which antibiotic-resistant bacteria were present, Dr. Hahn explains.

“Laboratory cultures are designed to grow certain types of bacteria that we know are problematic, but they don’t show everything,” she says. “By genetically sequencing these samples, we can see everything that’s there.”

Their results revealed a host of bacterial species present in these patients’ airways, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a notoriously hard-to-treat microbe. Patients who carried this or other antibiotic-resistant bacteria had significantly lower microbial diversity in their samples and more aggressive disease. Their samples also were more likely to contain bacteria of the genus Alcaligenes, whose role in CF is not yet known.

Although heavy antibiotic use probably contributed to both the antibiotic resistance and lowered microbial diversity, Dr. Hahn says, the answer isn’t to reduce use of these drugs: They’re necessary to help patients with CF recover after each bout with pulmonary exacerbations. Rather, she says, using methods beyond a simple lab culture can help doctors target infectious bacteria more selectively, perhaps avoiding collateral damage.

“We can’t stop using antibiotics,” she says, “but we can learn to use them better.”

In addition to Dr. Hahn, Children’s co-authors include Aszia Burrell; Hani Fanous; Hollis Chaney, M.D.; Iman Sami Zakhari, M.D.; Geovanny F. Perez, M.D.; Anastassios C. Koumbourlis, M.D., MPH; and Robert J. Freishtat, M.D., MPH; and Senior Author, Keith A. Crandall, of The George Washington University.

Financial support for the research described in this post was provided by the National Institutes of Health National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences under award number UL1TR000075 and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute under award number K12HL119994.

What Children’s has learned about congenital Zika infection

Roberta DeBiasi

Roberta DeBiasi, M.D., M.S., outlined lessons learned during a pediatric virology workshop at IDWeek2017, one of three such Zika presentations led by Children’s National research-clinicians during this year’s meeting of pediatric infectious disease specialists.

The Congenital Zika Virus Program at Children’s National Health System provides a range of advanced testing and services for exposed and infected fetuses and newborns. Data that the program has gathered in evaluating and managing Zika-affected pregnancies and births may offer instructive insights to other centers developing similar programs.

The program evaluated 36 pregnant women and their fetuses from January 2016 through May 2017. Another 14 women and their infants were referred to the Zika program for postnatal consultations during that time.

“As the days grow shorter and temperatures drop, we continue to receive referrals to our Zika program, and this is a testament to the critical need it fulfills in the greater metropolitan D.C. region,” says Roberta L. DeBiasi, M.D., M.S., chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases and co-leader of the program. “Our multidisciplinary team now has consulted on 90 dyads (mothers and their Zika-affected fetuses/infants). The lessons we learned about when and how these women were infected and how their offspring were affected by Zika may be instructive to institutions considering launching their own programs.”

Dr. DeBiasi outlined lessons learned during a pediatric virology workshop at IDWeek2017, one of three such Zika presentations led by Children’s National research-clinicians during this year’s meeting of pediatric infectious disease specialists.

“The Zika virus continues to circulate in dozens of nations, from Angola to the U.S. Virgin Islands. Clinicians considering a strategic approach to managing pregnancies complicated by Zika may consider enlisting an array of specialists to attend to infants’ complex care needs, including experts in fetal imaging, pediatric infectious disease, physical therapists, audiologists, ophthalmologists and radiologists skilled at reading serial magnetic resonance images as well as ultrasounds,” Dr. DeBiasi says. “At Children’s we have a devoted Zika hotline to triage patient and family concerns. We provide detailed instructions for referring institutions explaining protocols before and after childbirth, and we provide continuing education for health care professionals.”

Of the 36 pregnant women possibly exposed to Zika during pregnancy seen in the program’s first year, 32 lived in the United States and traveled to countries where Zika virus was circulating. Two women had partners who traveled to Zika hot zones. And two moved to the Washington region from places where Zika is endemic. Including the postnatal cases, 89 percent of patients had been bitten by Zika-tainted mosquitoes, while 48 percent of women could have been exposed to Zika via sex with an infected partner.

Twenty percent of the women were exposed before conception; 46 percent were exposed to Zika in the first trimester of pregnancy; 26 percent were exposed in the second trimester; and 8 percent were exposed in the final trimester. In only six of 50 cases (12 percent) did the Zika-infected individual experience symptoms.

Zika infection can be confirmed by detecting viral fragments but only if the test occurs shortly after infection. Twenty-four of the 50 women (nearly 50 percent) arrived for a Zika consultation outside that 12-week testing window. Eleven women (22 percent) had confirmed Zika infection and another 28 percent tested positive for the broader family of flavivirus infections that includes Zika. Another detection method picks up antibodies that the body produces to neutralize Zika virus. For seven women (14 percent), Zika infection was ruled out by either testing method.

“Tragically, four fetuses had severe Zika-related birth defects,” Dr. DeBiasi says. “Due to the gravity of those abnormalities, two pregnancies were not carried to term. The third pregnancy was carried to term, but the infant died immediately after birth. The fourth pregnancy was carried to term, but that infant survived less than one year.”