It takes up to 3 weeks for 90% of respiratory infections to resolve in kids

Reference

Hay AD, Anderson E, Ingle S, Beck C, Hollingworth W. Respiratory tract infections in children in the community: prospective online inception cohort study. Ann Fam Med 2019;17(1):14-22.

Synopsis

These researchers from the United Kingdom enrolled a cohort of 485 generally healthy children aged between 3 months and 15 years from February to July 2016. They recruited patients from the enrollment lists of practices located within 10 miles of Bristol. They excluded immunocompromised children and those with terminal illnesses. If the child had a respiratory illness, the researchers asked the parents to start the cohort once the symptoms resolved. Each week, the researchers sent an e-mail or text message asking whether the child had specific respiratory tract symptoms, such as rhinorrhea, earache, sore throat, or cough. If the child had any of these symptoms, the researchers asked the parent to provide daily online updates. They also asked the parents about missed school, medication use, consultations, and so forth. Based on the patient lists from the participating practices, participating children tended to be 2 years younger and less socioeconomically deprived than the nonparticipating children. During 5 months of follow up, parents reported 346 new respiratory infections in 259 children—53% of children had at least one new respiratory infection; the attack rate was 71% and afflicted kids averaged 1.3 infections during this short interval. The researchers report on 197 children's first illness. The median duration of illness was 9 days, but this is a skewed distribution with a long tail: It took 23 days for 90% of the children to recover. Approximately half the parents reported symptoms associated with lower respiratory infections and the presence of these symptoms was associated with longer duration. Sniffles tended to last, while earaches were of the shortest duration. Dry cough was most severe for the first 10 days, but also persisted for about 3 weeks. The parents had primary care consultations (office or telephone encounters) only 8% of the time, and only 9% of infections caused a missed day of school. As one might expect, the severity of symptoms was worse among those kids. Since a healthy chunk of the study period occurred in spring and summer, these numbers might be worse during fall and winter months.