COVID Infection Associated With a Greater Likelihood of Type 2 Diabetes Lenny Bernstein - Washington Post
go to original March 27, 2022

People who had COVID-19 were at greater risk of developing Type 2 diabetes within a year than those who managed to avoid the coronavirus, according to a large review of patient records.

The finding is true even for people who had less severe or asymptomatic forms of coronavirus infection, though the chances of developing new-onset diabetes were greater as the severity of COVID symptoms increased, according to researchers who reviewed the records of more than 181,000 Department of Veterans Affairs patients diagnosed with coronavirus infections between March 1, 2020, and Sept. 30, 2021.

Their data was compared to the medical records of more than 4.1 million VA patients who were not infected during the same period and another 4.28 million who received medical care from VA in 2018 and 2019. This kind of study cannot prove cause and effect, but it showed a strong association between the two diseases.

Overall, the researchers calculated that people diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, were 46 percent more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes for the first time or be prescribed medication to control their blood sugar. The research was released Monday in the Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, a medical journal.

Put another way, 2 in 100 COVID patients were more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes, a condition in which the pancreas makes insufficient amounts of the hormone insulin, leaving blood sugar levels poorly controlled. Type 2 diabetes can cause damage to kidneys, nerves, blood vessels and the heart, among its other effects.

The results have implications for the more than 471 million people known to have been infected during the pandemic, nearly 80 million of them in the United States, and especially for people suffering from long-haul COVID.

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Related: Some People Still Haven’t Gotten COVID, Here Are a Few Theories Why (HuffPost)