Effect of hydroxychloroquine use on the length of hospital stay in children diagnosed with COVID-19

OBJECTIVE: COVID-19 since the reporting of the first case of infection and its declaration as a pandemic, it caused morbidity and mortality in hundreds of thousands of people. In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of confirmed cases among children was relatively low, and therefore, data were limited. However, the number of pediatric cases has also risen markedly among children in the later stages of the pandemic. METHODS: Forty patients from 1 month to 18 years of age who presented to the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases of a tertiary research and training hospital between March 10, 2020, and May 31, 2020, with symptoms suggestive of COVID-19 infection and whose combined oropharyngeal and nasopharyngeal swab specimens tested positive on real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) were included in the study. RESULTS: Forty pediatric patients with a mean age of 109.1±66.1 months were included in the study. Among patients, 62.5% (25/40) were girls and 37.5% (15/40) were boys. The most presentation symptom was cough in 19 (47.5%) patients. Hydroxychloroquine (HQ) therapy was given as part of combination treatment to 15 symptomatic patients older than 72 months of age (72–143 months of age: 4 patient, 144–216 months of age: 11 patients). The mean time to a rRT-PCR negative test was 7.2±1.69 (4–10) days for the group receiving an HQ treatment protocol and 8.2±1.44 (6–11) days for the group receiving a non-HQ treatment protocol with no significant difference between the groups (p=0.054). CONCLUSION: In this study, it was shown that the use of HQ had no effect on the length of hospital stay and that there was no significant difference between patients in terms of epidemiological data.