After Covid-19, children produce more antibodies than adults

Children are less likely to get seriously ill with Corona. Much more often, a Covid-19 is just a cold for them. How does the child’s immune system work differently than in adults? A team of Italian researchers led by Constanza Di Chiara, Anna Cantarutti and Paola Costenaro may now provide a building block for answering this complex question. The doctors followed around 350 parents and children for around ten months, repeatedly taking blood and monitoring the antibody levels. The result was clear: the children had more antibodies than the adults at all times.

Neutralizing antibodies detectable up to 18 months after infection

Between April 2020 and August 2021, the researchers from the University Clinic in Padua repeatedly examined a total of 252 families in which some or all family members were infected. Among other things, they determined the amount of antibodies in blood sera against the receptor-binding domain of the spike protein of the coronavirus, i.e. the areas with which the virus infects human cells.

A total of 902 people took part in the study, 679 of whom had had Covid-19 but had not been vaccinated at the time of the study. Of these, 351 were children and 346 parents. 674 infections were mild or completely asymptomatic. In the journal JAMA Network Open, the team reports that the amount of antibodies in the test subjects decreased over the course of ten months or more, but neutralizing antibodies remained detectable in all those examined, sometimes up to 18 months after infection.

Small children had three times as many antibodies as adults

The researchers were particularly amazed that the antibody titers in children under the age of three were always higher than those in adults over the age of 18 at all times during the study. The titers of the special antibodies in the children were on average 304.8, in contrast to only 55.6 in the adults.

However, these results relate exclusively to variants before the delta variant; comparable data are still lacking for the currently dominant variants of Omicron.

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