T.Type 1 and 2 diabetes are among the pre-existing conditions associated with more severe COVID-19 and a higher risk of death from the infection. A growing number of reports have also linked coronavirus infections to new cases of diabetes, prompting researchers to investigate the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 is causing the metabolic disease.
To answer some of the questions about how the two diseases affect each other, researchers at King’s College London and Monash University in Australia last year set up the COVIDIAB registry to produce detailed reports on COVID-19-related diabetes. About 350 clinicians have filed reports to date, according to The Guardian.
“The relationship between COVID-19 and diabetes is very complex,” said Francesco Rubino, Chair of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery at King’s College London and one of the researchers who started the registration, told Scientific American. “It could affect more than one problem.”
A meta-analysis of more than 3,700 patients published in Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism in November found that 14.4 percent of COVID-19 patients were newly diagnosed with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes.
“We can clearly see that people without prior diabetes develop diabetes,” Remi Rabasa-Lhoret, a metabolic disease researcher at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute, told CTV News March 15. “It is very likely that COVID-19 will cause the disease.”
Although other viral infections like the flu have previously been implicated in new cases of diabetes, “the extent of what we see with COVID-19 is beyond what we are used to,” says Rabasa-Lhoret.
One of the many questions researchers have is whether emerging diabetes is caused by COVID-19 or whether these patients were already at risk of developing the disease. “It is possible that [a] The patient has lived with pre-diabetes for many years and didn’t know it, ”Mihail Zilbermint, endocrinologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, told CTV News. “Now they have COVID-19 infection and the infection is driving them to develop diabetes.”
There are a few ways COVID-19 can trigger diabetes, either caused by insufficient insulin, a hormone that regulates the absorption of sugar by cells, or decreased sensitivity to insulin. According to Scientific American, SARS-CoV-2 could attack the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas or other organs and tissues involved in the metabolism. Inflammation associated with COVID-19 could also affect blood sugar regulation via stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. It’s also possible that steroids, commonly used to treat COVID-19, play a role in the development of diabetes.
