A study led by the Paediatric Infectious Diseases and Immunodeficiencies Unit of the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital and the Infection in Immunocompromised Pediatric Patients group at the Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) has received the Anales de Pediatría award for being the most cited publication in 2020 and 2021 and that has contributed the most to the journal's impact index in the last two years. The article, written in collaboration with Dr. Maria Mercadal, from the Pediatric Hepatology and Liver Transplantation Unit; Dr. Esther Lera, from the Pediatric Emergency Unit; and Dr. Vicenç Garcia-Patos, from the Dermatology Department of the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital, describes two cases of children with COVID-19 who had skin lesions associated with the infection.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, it has been observed that children with COVID-19 are usually asymptomatic or have only mild symptoms. In June 2020, Vall d'Hebron was one of the first centers to describe and publish in a scientific journal two cases of infection-related skin involvement. Specifically, a 6-year-old boy with previous liver disease presented with a skin rash and a 2-month-old girl came to the emergency room with fever and urticaria. In both cases, the skin conditions resolved in less than a week without severity.

"We were one of the first centers to describe this type of affections, which were later observed in many children with COVID-19, especially in the first wave", explains Dr. Maria Espiau, pediatrician of the Paediatric Infectious Diseases and Immunodeficiencies Unit of the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital and the Infection in Immunocompromised Pediatric Patients group at VHIR. "It is important to know this symptomatology as part of the clinical picture of the disease, as it can be easily confused with other common childhood diseases. Publications such as ours provide information so that medical professionals can detect these conditions", says Dr. Miriam Morey, resident physician in the Paediatric Infectious Diseases and Immunodeficiencies Unit at Vall d'Hebron Hospital and first author of the paper.

The award granted to Vall d'Hebron will be used to facilitate the attendance of pediatric residents of the hospital to scientific congresses to encourage participation in research during their training.