Adam Millar was 18 when he started to experience a cold that wouldn’t go away.
It was the middle of hockey season, so he brushed his symptoms off. After what seemed like two or three months of a cough and fatigue, his cold progressed. “I didn’t even have the energy to stand to brush my teeth,” he told USA TODAY.
Millar’s heart was in failure, he later found out. Heart failure — often caused by myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle — is a rare condition for teens and young adults. It’s more common in older people, often the result of heart function declining over a period of years.
Yet, since the beginning of the pandemic, a verysmall subset of young people infected with COVID-19 have developed heart failure.
Yes, kids can get COVID-19:More than 1 million have been infected in U.S. since the pandemic’s start, report says
This summer, doctors in New York reported a 2-month-old boy diagnosed with COVID-19 later suffered from heart failure, signaling yet another COVID-19 complication for kids.
The boy had been choking, later turning blue, despite no prior fever, cough or other sign of infection, doctors reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
That infant represents the youngest-known case of myocarditis caused by COVID-19, Dr. Madhu Sharma told MedPage Today. Sharma is a doctor at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore at New York City and contributed to the case report.
But that isn’t the first case of myocarditis in young people…
