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A team of researchers from King’s College London and Monash University has created a database of information related to COVID-19 and Type II diabetes. The team created the database for two reasons: First, research to date has shown that people with type II diabetes are more likely to experience severe disease symptoms and die from them than the general population. The second reason is that there is growing evidence that COVID-19 can actually cause people to become diabetic.
The new database is called COVIDIAB Registration and is specifically designed to help medical researchers better understand the link between COVID-19 and diabetes. The data was collected from patients regarding their circumstances, including whether they were new. The developers suggest that the amount of data will increase as more is learned about the effects of COVID-19 on diabetes patients. Some media have reported that the database already catalogs information from 350 clinicians.
It is still not clear why people with diabetes suffer more when infected with COVID-19, or why some suffer more than others. It is also unclear whether COVID-19 can cause diabetes. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, doctors have been reporting on patients who develop diabetes shortly after contracting COVID-19. The researchers hope that setting up the database will help find out whether COVID-19 complications can lead to the onset of diabetes. Doctors need to know whether such patients would develop diabetes anyway, whether they were prediabetic and caused COVID-19, or whether people with no tendency to become diabetic are able to develop the disease soon after developing COVID-19.
In particular, some medical researchers have reported to the press that there are two ways COVID-19 could cause a person to develop Type II diabetes. The first is due to an attack on the pancreas, which reduces its ability to produce and regulate insulin levels. The second could happen when COVID-19 triggers an inflammatory response in the body that affects blood sugar regulation due to the release of stress hormones. They also found that it is possible that some patients may have developed diabetes after receiving steroids to treat their COVID-19.
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Quote: Growing evidence that COVID-19 can cause Type II diabetes (2021, March 22nd) was released on March 22nd, 2021 from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-03-evidence-mounting-covid- diabetes-ii.html accessed
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