Risk of developing diabetes after Covid-19 continued in Omicron era, study says

CNN
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People infected with Covid-19 have an increased risk of developing diabetes, a link that appears to have persisted into Omicron’s time, a new study has found.

A growing body of evidence suggests that Covid-19 infection is linked to new diagnoses of diabetes, but it is not clear whether this association is accidental or causal.

for their researchPublished Tuesday at the JAMA Network Open, researchers at Los Angeles’ Cedars Sinai Medical Center examined the medical records of more than 23,000 adults with at least one Covid-19 infection.

How likely are these people to have a new diagnosis of diabetes, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol within 3 months of being infected with the new coronavirus compared to 3 months before infection? was examined.

Health care visits were often interrupted during the pandemic, so many people are trying to get regular checkups and checkups they may have missed.

Researchers have found that this can make them more likely to receive new diagnoses for conditions they may be developing anyway, such as diabetes. They also looked at the risk of what they called a benchmark diagnosis—a new diagnosis of acid reflux or UTI—as a way to address this bias.

Raw data showed that people infected with Covid-19 had a higher risk of being diagnosed with diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure after infection.

However, when the researchers adjusted these numbers to account for the benchmark diagnosis, only the risk of diabetes remained significantly elevated. 58% increase.

Dr. Luke Wonder, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, said the findings mirror the results of several other studies.

The new study is notable because it adds recent data, said Wander, who was not involved in the research. We also used strategies to address changes in healthcare during the pandemic.

Another strength of this study was that it included people diagnosed between March 2020 and June 2022, allowing risk to be estimated even after the Omicron variant swept the United States.

Some studies suggest that Omicron causes less severe Covid-19 infections than previous variants.

“A less severe viral infection might be expected to have fewer off-target effects on the cardiometabolic system,” said lead author Alan Kwan, Ph.D., a cardiologist at Cedars Sinai. I’m here.

“We didn’t really see it,” he said. “We basically saw a pattern that held throughout.”

This study is also notable for examining the role of vaccination and finding that it may help prevent diabetes.

When the researchers analyzed the data to distinguish between those who had been vaccinated against coronavirus and those who had not, they found that vaccinated people had little increased risk of diabetes after Covid-19, but the vaccine did not. those who had not been vaccinated had a nearly 80% higher chance of a new diabetes diagnosis. However, this difference was not statistically significant. Kwan says the relationship might have been clearer if the researchers had a little more data.

Scientists aren’t sure how Covid-19 increases the risk of diabetes. Wonder said there could be several reasons.

“The virus could directly alter the body’s ability to produce or use insulin,” she wrote in an email.

Alternatively, the lifestyle changes made during the pandemic (perhaps less exercise and more junk food) may have contributed.

“Finally, we cannot rule out the possibility that this pattern is the result of increased laboratory testing of individuals recently infected with SARS-CoV-2,” said Wander.

To really understand whether diabetes is another post-pandemic disease, we need to track people to gather information about social factors related to the pandemic and changes in the body’s ability to produce and use insulin. Research is needed.