At the start of the
coronavirus pandemic, doctors started to raise concerns around new cases of diabetes in people who had caught the virus.
Since early reports first came to light, we've seen results from larger studies looking at big groups of people who’ve recovered from coronavirus. One study tracked over 47,000 people in England who had been admitted to hospital because of coronavirus before August 2020. The researchers followed their health for up to seven months after they were discharged and found 5% of people went on to develop diabetes.
They also showed that people who’d been in hospital with coronavirus were 1.5 times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes after they’d been discharged than people of the same age and background who hadn’t been in hospital with coronavirus.
In 2022, researchers in the United States published findings from their analysis of health insurance data from around 1.6 million children, under the age of 18 years.
They looked at who’d been diagnosed with diabetes between March 2020 – March 2021 and if there were any differences in rates of diagnoses between children who’d had coronavirus, children who hadn’t, and children who had other types of respiratory infections. The study didn't distinguish between type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
The researchers studied two different sets of data. In both datasets, children who’d had coronavirus were more likely to later be diagnosed with diabetes than those who hadn’t had coronavirus or had a different type of respiratory infection.
In the first dataset, the researchers found after having coronavirus, children were around 2.5 times (166%) more likely to develop diabetes than children who hadn’t been infected. In the other dataset the increased risk was smaller, at 31%. These differences in risk are likely down to differences in the way data was classified and collected. Respiratory infections that weren’t coronavirus were not found to be linked with an increased risk of diabetes.
The evidence to suggest a link between coronavirus and new cases of diabetes is growing but there’s still a lot we don’t know. We can’t yet be sure if coronavirus is directly causing diabetes, or whether there are other factors that could explain the link.