What binds diabetes and coronavirus?
In this article we will try to understand, based on recent scientific studies, whether there is a possibility that coronavirus can cause type 2 diabetes.
Or whether people with diabetes may have a higher risk of complications.

Let’s start with the first question, which is undoubtedly the most worrying.

In fact, we know that Covid-19 causes a series of damages which in some cases risk becoming permanent and in others they are temporary.

Among the transient ones, we have changes in olfactory and gustatory perception, so there are cases in which people are no longer able to drink or eat certain foods. Or on the contrary, they mistake pleasant smells for nauseating.

DIABETES AND CORONAVIRUS: CAN COVID CAUSE TYPE 2 DIABETES?

According to an editorial signed by researchers in the New England Journal of Medecine, people with no previous history of diabetes or family members who were hospitalized for coronavirus had hyperglycemia, ketoacidosis, or signs of acute diabetes.

The editorial refers, among others, to a Chinese study , which appeared in the journal Acta Diabetologica . 39 patients who had type 2 diabetes after a coronavirus infection were examined here.

The hypothesis is that viruses belonging to the Coronavirus type damage the cells of the pancreas responsible for producing insulin. But not permanently, if only one person in the sample still had type 2 diabetes after three years.

As for Covid-19, however, it may also be that the patients seen in other studies, which confirm the thesis that Coronavirus causes diabetes, were heavily undernourished before hospitalization.

And this, for example, would justify the increased presence of ketones in the blood.
So at the moment it is a suspicion that should be confirmed by further studies.

And which in any case concerns a very small percentage of Coronavirus patients.

DIABETES AND CORONAVIRUS: DO WHO HAS DIABETES HAVE MORE RISKS?

The answer in this case would seem rather affirmative, because here we have many more studies that talk about it.

Diabetes like obesity is one of those conditions that puts you at the greatest risk of complications from Covid-19.

That is, it is not that diabetic people like obese people become more infected.
But it is true that, of all the people who end up hospitalized for Coronavirus interstitial pneumonia, some are observed to have diabetes or obesity. It is therefore a fact that has emerged a posteriori in various studies, including this one .

In this case, we are talking about both forms of diabetes: also type 1 which is an autoimmune condition.
The hypothesis is that a previous inflammatory state at the metabolic level increases the chances of having complications in the case of infection.