Key Points
After 25 years as a pediatric infectious diseases specialist, Asuncin Mejas is too familiar with the deadly unpredictability of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), an infection that hospitalizes up to 80,000 children under the age of 5 every year in the US...
Earlier this year, respiratory epidemiologist Tina Hartert and her colleagues at Vanderbilt University developed one such tool using a statistical model to identify a set of 19 risk factors for RSV, after training it on data from more than 400,000 infants on the Tennessee Medicaid program..
Assessing just individual factors misses lots of at-risk infants, she says.. In 2023, regulators in the US approved a vaccine called Abrysvo that is designed to be given to mothers during weeks 32 to 36 of pregnancy, with the aim of ensuring that babies are born with protective antibodies against RSV..
Vartiainen has developed a tool similar to Harterts, called RSV Risk, based on a number of clinical measurements including birth weight, mothers age, family history, and whether a child was born with conditions such as congenital heart defects..
If you take the 10 percent of children who have the highest predicted risk, the data from our study showed that their actual risk of severe RSV infection is almost five times higher than the rest, he says.. While the digital tools developed so far are intended to inform medical decisions such as immunizations shortly after a child is born, Mejas predicts that, in the coming years, there could also be more advanced options to screen children when they are admitted to hospital with a serious RSV infection...
