Covid causes type 1 diabetes

Add another danger to the long list of possible complications from a Covid-19 infection: A new study suggests an increased risk of diabetes. Researchers at VA Saint Louis Health Care System compared more than 181,000 people who had recovered from Covid-19 to more than 4.1 million people who hadn’t been infected over the same period. They found that in the year after their recovery, those in the Covid group were 40 percent more likely to develop a new case of diabetes than those in the control group. That equates to 1 in 100 people at increased risk. As almost 80 million Americans have been infected with Covid, that could mean nearly 800,000 are now more likely to get diabetes. “That’s hard for me to swallow,” lead author Ziyad Al-Aly tells ABCNews.com. “Covid-19 isn’t only about the acute effects. This is going to leave a lot of people with long-term health consequences that they’ll have to deal with for a lifetime, and that’s jarring.” It’s unclear why the virus might increase diabetes risk. One theory is that it drives inflammation, which may impair insulin secretion—a factor in the disease.

That’s a massive increase: The average annual growth between 1999 and 2017 was just 2.2 percent. There were 78,927 deaths involving booze in 2019—including liver failures and fatal car crashes involving a drunk driver—but a new study shows the number shot up to 99,017 in 2020. That means that alcohol killed more adults under 65 than Covid did that year. The spike was seen across all age groups, with the largest increase among 35- to 44-year-olds. Alcohol sales also rose some 3 percent, the most in 50 years. “It’s unfortunate, but we sort of expected to see something like this,” says Aaron White, from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the lead author of the study. “It’s not uncommon for people to drink more when they’re under more duress, and obviously, the pandemic brought a lot of added stress to people’s lives.” He said the pandemic also robbed people of stress-relievers such as access to gyms and outings with friends.