When Ziyad Al-Aly’s research team told him how often diabetes appeared to strike Covid-19 survivors, he thought the data must be wrong, so he asked his five colleagues to crunch the numbers again. Weeks later, they returned the same findings after sifting through millions of patient records. By then Al-Aly had also gone digging into the scientific literature and was starting to come to terms with an alarming reality: Covid-19 isn’t just deadlier for people with diabetes, it’s also triggering the metabolic disease in many who didn’t previously have it. “It took a while to convince me,” said Al-Aly, who directs the clinical epidemiology center at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri. “It was hard to believe that Covid could be doing this.”
Two pandemics clash as doctors find that Covid spurs diabetes
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Last Updated: May 05, 2021, 11:45 AM IST
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Synopsis
The data was published last month in Nature, three weeks after a study of almost 50,000 hospitalized Covid patients in England found that they were 50% more likely to have diabetes some 20 weeks after discharge than matched controls.
Reuters
Researchers have hypothesized pathways in which Covid might increase the likelihood of a diabetes diagnosis.
When Ziyad Al-Aly’s research team told him how often diabetes appeared to strike Covid-19 survivors, he thought the data must be wrong, so he asked his five colleagues to crunch the numbers again.