Report: Virus may increase the risk of Type 2 diabetes

NEW YORK » People infected with the coronavirus were significantly more likely to be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes within a year of their infection, compared with those who had not been exposed to the virus, researchers in Canada reported Tuesday.

Men were more likely to develop diabetes than women, the scientists found. People who were so sick that they were hospitalized were more than twice as likely to go on to a diabetes diagnosis, compared with those who were not infected.

People who were admitted to intensive care were more than three times as likely to develop diabetes, the researchers also found.

“This is definitely a concern in terms of long-term outcomes,” said Dr. Naveed Z. Janjua, the paper's senior author and a professor at the School of Population and Public Health at University of British Columbia.

“With a respiratory infection, you usually think, `Seven or eight days, and I'm done with it; that's it,'” he added. “Here we're seeing lingering effects that are lifelong.”

The study, published in JAMA Network Open, used a large data set from British Columbia to compare diabetes diagnoses among more than 125,000 individuals who had tested positive for COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021 with those of more than 500,000 unexposed individuals during the same period.

COVID-19 vaccines became available in December 2020, and a majority of participants in both the exposed and unexposed groups had not been fully vaccinated.

More than a dozen studies have looked at the link between COVID-19 and diabetes, and a majority have reported an increase in diagnosis following infection, as well as higher risks for men and those with severe disease.

The findings do not prove that the infection causes diabetes, however. Experts said it was possible, for instance, that patients recovering from COVID-19 were more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes simply because they were receiving more regular care.