People who have had Covid are more at risk of developing diabetes, says research

People who have had Covid-19 have a higher risk of developing diabetes, and that link appears to have persisted into the Omicron era, according to a new study.

Growing evidence suggests that Covid-19 infections are linked to a new diagnosis of diabetes, although it is unclear whether this link is coincidental or cause and effect.

For the study, published last week in the JAMA Network Openresearchers at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles studied the medical records of more than 23,000 adults who had Covid-19 at least once.

They looked at how likely these people were to receive a new diagnosis of diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol in the three months after being infected with Covid-19 compared to the three months before.

Because visits to healthcare facilities have often been disrupted during the pandemic, many people are just getting routine checkups and checkups they may have left behind.

The researchers realized that this could make them more likely to get a new diagnosis of a condition, like diabetes, that they might be developing anyway. To control for this, they also looked at the risk of something they called a baseline diagnosis — a new diagnosis of acid reflux or urinary tract infection — as a way to address this bias.

The raw data showed that people who had Covid-19 had higher risks of being diagnosed with diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure after their infections.

But when the researchers adjusted these numbers to account for the baseline diagnosis, only the risk of diabetes remained significantly elevated. Covid-19 increased the odds of a new diabetes diagnosis by around 58%.

Luke Wander, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, said the findings echo those of several other studies.

The new study is notable because it adds recent data, said Wander, who was not involved in the research. Strategies were also used to try to address changes in health care during the pandemic.

Another strength of the study was that it included people diagnosed between March 2020 and June 2022, so it was able to estimate risk even after the Omicron variant swept across the United States.

Several studies have suggested that Omicron causes less severe Covid-19 infections than the variants that preceded it.

“One would expect that with a less severe viral infection, perhaps you would have less off-target effects on your cardiometabolic system,” said lead study author Dr. Alan Kwan, a cardiologist at Cedars Sinai.

“We haven’t really seen that,” he said. “We saw, essentially, the pattern maintained throughout.”

The study also looked at the role of vaccination and found that it can help protect against diabetes.

When the researchers analyzed their data to distinguish between those who were vaccinated against the coronavirus and those who were not, they found that those vaccinated had almost no increased risk of post-COVID-19 diabetes, but the unvaccinated had nearly 80% more risk. of a new diagnosis of diabetes. This difference was not statistically significant, however. Kwan says that if the researchers had a little more data, the connection might be clearer.

Scientists are not sure how Covid-19 might increase the risk of diabetes. There could be several reasons, Wander said.

“It is plausible that the virus could act directly to alter the body’s ability to produce or use insulin,” she wrote in an email.

Or, she said, it’s possible that lifestyle changes made during the pandemic — perhaps less exercise and more junk food — could be contributing.

“Ultimately, we cannot exclude the possibility that this pattern is an artifact of increased laboratory testing among individuals with recent SARS-CoV-2 infection,” Wander said.

To really understand whether diabetes is a different disease after the pandemic, Wander said, studies that follow people would be needed to gather information about social factors related to the pandemic and changes in the body’s ability to make and use insulin.