Study Says Cerebral Malaria Could Cause Brain Injury in Kids

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have linked cerebral malaria to long-term cognitive impairment in one of four African kids.

Malaria is a leading cause of death for kids in sub-Saharan Africa and cerebral malaria, which affects more than 750,000 children a year, is one of the deadliest forms of the disease.

It only takes one bite from an infected mosquito to contract the disease that directly affects the brain, causing fever, vomiting, chills, and coma.

"Children with cerebral malaria recover quite dramatically if they survive the period of coma," said Chandy John, M.D., associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota and principal investigator of the study.

"But before this study, no one had prospectively assessed what happened to their thinking in the years after they had the cerebral malaria episode," John added.

For the study, John and colleagues evaluated cognitive function in children 5-12 years old with cerebral malaria who had been admitted to the Mulago Hospital, Kampala, Uganda.

The kids were evaluated for cognitive function in three major areas: attention, working memory, and tactile learning.

Evaluation was done at hospitalisation, six months after the initial malaria episode, and two years after the episode.

Researchers found that at six months, 21 percent of children with cerebral malaria had cognitive impairment compared with 6 percent of their healthy Ugandan peers.

At two years, cognitive impairment was present in 26 percent of the patients, compared with 8 percent of the community children.