Health Experts Probe If Covid Is Causing Diabetes

Type 1 diabetes occurs when the body’s immune system mistakenly destroys insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, preventing the regulation of blood sugar levels. About 1.6 million Americans have the disease.

Type 2 diabetes is more prevalent, afflicting about 30 million Americans. Those patients still produce insulin, but over time their cells become insulin-resistant, allowing blood sugar to rise.

Type 1 diabetes cases have previously been associated with other viral infections, including influenza and previous coronaviruses. It is known that infections can stress the body and increase blood sugar levels.

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But this tends to happen in people predisposed to the disease. Only some of them eventually develop diabetes, and scientists still don’t fully understand this particular coronavirus effect.

This year, doctors also are seeing some people without the risk factors for type 2 diabetes — such as being older or overweight — experience a diabetic emergency after exposure to the novel virus.

In type 1 diabetes, initial symptoms can include extreme thirst, fatigue, frequent urination and weight loss. Arthur Simis had no idea those were signs for the disease.

This summer, he and his wife, Sarah, noticed their 12-year-old son, Atticus, appeared thin and slept a lot. They figured he was stressed out from being trapped at home in the pandemic, or going through a growth spurt.

On July 9, as his symptoms persisted, Arthur Simis took his son to an urgent care center near their home in Gardnerville, Nevada.

The medical staff detected dangerously high blood sugar levels and ketones in his urine, both indicators that Atticus was in diabetic ketoacidosis, or DKA.

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The doctor told Simis that his son needed hospital care immediately to avoid slipping into a coma from his newly diagnosed type 1. An ambulance took them 50 miles to the nearest hospital in Reno.

His father spent three nights sleeping at his side in the pediatric ICU. He sobbed on the phone to his wife, because only one parent was allowed inside, a measure to control coronavirus infections.

“How could he have diabetes?” Simis recalls asking the doctors. “It was absolutely terrifying.”

Simis believes his son had been infected by the coronavirus because the father and his wife experienced symptoms in the spring.

The couple went to urgent care but never got tested for the coronavirus because of stricter testing criteria at the time.

Atticus tested negative for an active coronavirus infection in the ICU, medical records show. But he was never tested for antibodies that could show whether he was exposed weeks earlier.

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Doctors say that’s not unusual in a fast-moving pandemic, as they focus on individual emergencies rather than big-picture research questions.

But the lack of testing in many of these cases, they say, may complicate efforts to detect whether and how the coronavirus might be causing diabetes.

Children in intensive care

The initial reports of Covid-related diabetes include more children with cases like that of Atticus.