Virus can trigger diabetes, growing evidence suggests

Doctors and researchers are gathering a growing body of evidence suggesting that COVID-19 can cause diabetes.

A medical worker handles test samples at a lab for COVID-19 coronavirus disease in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Picture: AFP

Doctors and researchers are gathering a growing body of evidence suggesting that COVID-19 can cause diabetes in some patients who contract the virus.

Warnings that it might trigger diabetes were sounded in the early months of the pandemic by doctors in Wuhan and in Italy.

A study published in November found that 14.4 per cent of people who became severely ill with COVID-19 developed diabetes. But there was also a case of an 18-year-old student in Germany who suffered no symptoms while infected with the coronavirus but who began to feel listless a month later.

He had diabetes diagnosed, with his doctor suggesting that its sudden onset could be linked to the student’s infection, according to the journal Nature.

A health worker administers a dose of the Pfizer-BioNtech COVID-19 vaccine in the Israeli city of Petah Tikva. Picture: AFP

A co-ordinated effort to gather a database of such examples, involving more than 300 research institutions, is now said to have found more than 150 cases.

The researchers behind the Covid-IAB Registry note that people with diabetes have consistently been reported to suffer worse outcomes when they became infected. But there are also cases in which the virus appears to have affected diabetes, or even to have caused it. Researchers have said elevated blood sugar could be triggered by a steroid used to treat severe cases of COVID-19 but there are also cases of diabetes that seem to occur months after an infection.

Professor Francesco Rubino, chairman of metabolic and bariatric surgery at King’s College London, who is one of the founders of the registry, said it would help them answer whether there is “true Covid-induced diabetes, not a case that could be classified as unknown pre-existing diabetes”.

The Times

Funeral workers move a sealed coffin containing a COVID-19 victim in Surabaya, Indonesia. Picture: AFP