Study Suggests a 28% Increased Risk of Type 2 Diabetes After Covid-19

Study Suggests a 28% Increased Risk of Type 2 Diabetes After Covid-19

There have been many recorded cases of individuals who have previously had COVID-19 experiencing heart problems, a reduction in grey matter thickness in the brain, and problems with cognitive function, now researchers believe that COVID-19 can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

A study conducted in Germany compared 35,865 individuals who had contracted COVID-19 with a control group of 35,865 individuals and found that people who had previously contracted COVID-19 had a significantly higher chance of developing type 2 diabetes. In the COVID-19 group, there were 15.8 new cases of type 2 diabetes per 1,000 people per year, compared to 12.3 per 1,000 people in the control group. That is a 28% increased risk of developing diabetes after suffering COVID-19.

This is not the only study to be conducted to investigate a possible link between COVID-19 and type 2 diabetes, but previous studies were conducted on limited sample sizes, and most of the studies conducted so far have been hospital-based. The researchers in Germany used a nationwide primary care database to significantly increase the sample size, which was representative of diagnoses and drug prescriptions, and they said recall bias was unlikely because of the use of original data collected in primary care.

While there appears to be a link between the development of type 2 diabetes and past COVID-19 infection, the researchers point out that there are several unanswered questions, such as whether pre-existing diabetes became apparent as a consequence of immunological activation or stress hyperglycaemia caused by COVID-19, and whether diabetes could be reversed once patients had fully recovered from COVID-19.

“The present primary care study indicates a temporal relationship between mostly mild Covid-19 and newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes,” wrote the researchers. “If confirmed, this study supports the potential relevance of active monitoring of glucose dysregulation after recovery from mild forms of SARS-CoV-2 infection,”

You can read more about the study in the paper – Incidence of newly diagnosed diabetes after Covid-19 – which was recently published in Diabetologia. DOI: 10.1007/s00125-022-05670-0