Kawasaki Disease in Latin American Children: Past, Current, and Future Challenges

Kawasaki disease (KD) is the leading cause of acquired cardiac disease in children in developed countries and Asia. However, there is a paucity of data available from Latin America. In response to the gap in knowledge about KD in Latin America, a group of pediatric infectious disease researchers from the Kawasaki Disease Research Center at the University of California San Diego and the Sociedad Latinoamericana de Infectología Pediátrica joined efforts during the last decade to address this problem. The Red de Enfermedad de Kawasaki en América Latina (Latin American Kawasaki Disease Network) was launched in 2013 to study the epidemiology of KD among children from the major pediatric tertiary referral hospitals in Latin America. This multinational multicenter network is primarily composed of pediatric infectious diseases, cardiology, rheumatology, and immunology subspecialists and pediatricians from 20 countries, and it is one of the world's largest networks to study the general epidemiology of KD. The first 2 prospective and retrospective multinational multicenter studies looking at the epidemiology of KD in the region were initiated in 2014. Future plans for the network include establishing collaborative research alliances and projects with other centers around the world. To date [ 1], there have been no published studies describing the overall incidence and prevalence of KD in Latin American children. The most important and recent epidemiological study addressing this issue, related to Chile, was published in 2012 [ 2]. Of these, the most recent relevant study addressed the seasonality of KD in different parts of the globe, including some Latin American and Caribbean countries [ 4]. In this document, we briefly summarize relevant available information from Latin America. Although there have been other publications from individual countries that are outside the scope of this communication, the majority of these reports are single case reports, or case series that have been published predominantly in local journals that are not indexed in PubMed and instead are in regional Spanish, Portuguese, and English databases.