Health Experts Probe If Covid Is Causing Diabetes

WASHINGTON, KOMPAS.com – Doctors and scientists are scrambling to determine if getting diabetes is one of the effects of coronavirus.

The Covid-19 virus is known to have a dangerous relationship with cases of infected people with diabetes which predominantly leads to death.

Many health experts also convinced that having diabetes could be one of the effects of coronavirus — even in some adults and children who do not have the traditional risk factors.

Mario Buelna, a healthy 28-year-old father, caught a fever and started having trouble breathing in June. He soon tested positive for Covid-19.

Read also: Remdesivir has ‘Little or No Effect on Covid-19 Mortality: WHO Study

Weeks later, after what had seemed like a recovery, he felt weak and started vomiting. At 3am on August 1, he passed out on the floor of his home in Mesa, Arizona.

Paramedics rushed him to a nearby hospital, where doctors put him in intensive care after saving him from a coma. They told him he could have died.

Their diagnosis — type 1 diabetes — stunned and frightened him because he had no history of the disease.

“Covid triggered it,” Buelna said the doctors told him.

It’s already been well-documented that people with diabetes face much higher risks of severe illness or death if they contract Covid-19.

In July, US health officials found that nearly 40 percent of people who have died with Covid-19 had diabetes. Now, cases like Buelna’s suggest the connection between the diseases runs both ways.

Read also: Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 Vaccine Trial Paused Over Unexplained Illness

“Covid could be causing diabetes from scratch,” said Dr. Francesco Rubino, a diabetes researcher and chair of metabolic and bariatric surgery at King’s College London.

Rubino is leading an international team that is collecting patient cases globally to unravel one of the biggest mysteries of the pandemic.

Initially, he said, more than 300 doctors have applied to share cases for review, a number he expects to grow as infections flare up again.

“These cases are coming from every corner of the world and every continent,” Rubino told Reuters.

In addition to the global registry, the US National Institutes of Health is financing research into how the coronavirus may cause diabetes and high blood sugars.

In these situations, symptoms can escalate quickly and become life-threatening.

These cases may take months to surface after exposure to Covid-19, so the full extent of the problem and the long-term ramifications may not be known until well into next year.

More intensive research is needed to definitively prove, beyond the mounting anecdotal evidence, that the effects of coronavirus include triggering diabetes on a wide scale.

“We have more questions than answers right now,” said Dr. Robert Eckel, president of medicine and science at the American Diabetes Association. “We could be dealing with an entirely new form of diabetes.”

'Absolutely terrifying' diagnosis