INTRODUCTION
COVID-19, which emerged first in China and has caused a global pandemic, causes milder clinical symptoms in children than in adults, while very few cases result in mortality1,2,3. The clinical picture of COVID-19 varies in a broad range from asymptomatic disease to multisystem dysfunction. The most frequently seen symptoms are fever, cough, nasal symptoms, diarrhea, nausea/vomiting, fatigue and respiratory distress3,4. The standard diagnostic tool for COVID-19 is the real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) method5. Nevertheless, studies have reported that false-negative PCR results may be encountered due to various causes6,7. In particular, in patients who have clinical and epidemiological characteristics compatible with COVID-19 and negative RT-PCR test results, CT is also widely utilized for the early diagnosis of COVID-19 8,9.
Although prognostic factors in COVID-19 patients have not been sufficiently explained, the relationship between lung parenchyma involvement and poor prognosis is known well10. It was previously shown that pulmonary artery (PA) expansion in CT scans was associated with pulmonary hypertension (PH)11. PH, which develops as a result of inflammation forming in the lungs, hypoxia and increased pulmonary vascular resistance (PVR), causes right ventricular (RV) deficiency, as well as early mortality in the case of unresponsiveness to treatment12. Therefore, changes occurring in the diameter of PA may provide new data in shedding light on COVID-19-related morbidity and mortality. While there are a limited number of studies investigating the relationship between PA diameters and COVID-19 in adults, the literature review that was conducted in our study did not reveal any study that examined this issue in children. In this study, it was aimed to investigate the relationship between COVID-19 and PA diameters in pediatric patients.