Child's Health · Published 2026-06-24 · DOI 10.22141/2224-0551.21.4.2026.1962
V.V. Yevtushenko, S.O. Kramarov, I.Yu. Seriakova, L.O. Palatna, M.O. Dudnikova
Background. Despite available data, the problem of early prediction of COVID-19 severity in the pediatric population remains unresolved. The purpose was to assess the prognostic significance of NSE, S100, IFABP, NGAL, and E-selectin biomarkers in children with COVID-19 and to develop an integrated risk score for early identification of groups at risk of a complicated course. Materials and methods. The study was retrospective, observational and comparative. It included 88 children aged 0–18 years with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 who were inpatients at the Kyiv City Children’s Clinical Infectious Diseases Hospital in 2022–2023. Participants were divided into two groups depending on the damage of the upper or lower respiratory tract, which corresponded to the mild and moderate course of the disease. Serum level of biomarkers (NSE, S100, IFABP, NGAL, E-selectin) was determined by the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay during hospitalization. Statistical analysis was performed using the licensed program EZR v.1.54 (Graphical User Interface for R statistical software version 4.0.3, R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria). Results. The study found that children with complicated COVID-19 had higher levels of NSE, E-selectin, IFABP, and NGAL compared to patients with uncomplicated disease, while S100 levels did not differ significantly between groups. According to the results of ROC analysis, all studied biomarkers demonstrated prognostic value for the development of COVID-19 complications in children (AUC 0.647–0.843), with S100 and NSE having the highest efficacy. The developed integrated risk scale based on five biomarkers demonstrated good discriminatory ability (AUC = 0.806; sensitivity 88.1 %; specificity 73.9 %) and allowed stratifying patients according to the level of risk of developing complicated COVID-19. Conclusions. The prognostic significance of NSE, S100, IFABP, NGAL and E-selectin biomarkers has been established for the development of complicated COVID-19 in children and the formation of lesions of the nervous, gastrointestinal, cardiovascular systems and endothelium. An integrated risk scale has been created, which allows for early stratification of patients and predicting the severity of the disease.
Abstract from DOAJ. Public domain (CC0 1.0).
Read the article at the publisher →
Yevtushenko, V., Kramarov, S., Seriakova, I., et al. (2026). An integrated biomarker-based prognostic scale for assessing the risk of severe COVID-19 in children. Child's Health. https://doi.org/10.22141/2224-0551.21.4.2026.1962