Covid sufferers face increased risk of diabetes, study finds

Experts warn pandemic could leave ‘legacy of chronic disease’

(PA)

Individuals who get Covid-19 are at greater risk of developing diabetes than those who never had the disease, a major study has found.

People who contract coronavirus, even after mild infection, can develop the condition up to a year later, researchers at the Veterans Affairs (VA) St Louis Healthcare System in Missouri have warned.

The study of almost 200,000 people is one of a growing number of reports showing that Covid can increase a person’s risk of developing diabetes, even months after infection.

“When this whole pandemic recedes, we’re going to be left with the legacy of this pandemic — a legacy of chronic disease” for which healthcare systems are unprepared, its co-author Ziyad Al-Aly said.

Alongside another epidemiologist, Yan Xie, Al-Aly looked at the medical records of over 180,000 people who had survived for more than a month after catching Covid.

The pair compared these with records from two groups, each of which comprised around four million people without infection who had used the VA system, before or during the pandemic.

Their analysis found that people who had caught Covid were about 40 per cent more likely to develop diabetes up to a year later than those in the control groups.

As such, of every 1,000 people studied in each group, around 13 more individuals in the Covid group were diagnosed with diabetes.

They detected type two diabetes in almost all cases, in which the body becomes resistant to or doesn’t produce enough insulin.

In addition, the researchers found that the chance of developing diabetes rose alongside the increasing severity of Covid.

Dr Al-Aly said that people who were hospitalised or admitted to intensive care had approximately triple the risk compared with control individuals who did contract the disease.

The odds of contracting diabetes also increased for people who had mild infections and no previous risk factors for the condition, he added.

Of the people with Covid who avoided hospital, an extra eight people out of every 1,000 studied had developed diabetes a year later compared with people who were not infected.

Meanwhile, people with a high BMI had more than double the risk of developing diabetes after being infected with coronavirus.

Since the veterans in the study were mostly older, white men - many of whom had high blood pressure and were overweight, putting them at increased risk of developing diabetes - experts said that their findings might not translate to other groups of people.

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist studying diabetes at the University of Wollongong in Australia also noted that risk is much lower in younger people and higher in some other ethnic groups.

Dr Al-Aly added that some people in the control group had undetected mild or asymptomatic Covid but were never tested, potentially skewing the data.

Shaw said that several other factors could also be contributing to the rise in diabetes among people who recovered from Covid. Existing cases of diabetes might have gone undetected until people sought medical care for coronavirus.

The question as to whether the metabolic changes observed in people who had Covid persist after a year remains, the researchers said, adding that further studies are needed to clarify long-term trends in new-onset diabetes at a population level.