Early in its outbreak, the CCP virus (COVID-19) was thought to be a lung disease only, but it was gradually discovered to be destructive to multiple organs and body systems in the human body. Recently, some experts have discovered that the CCP virus is not only more deadly for people with diabetes, but can also cause this metabolic disease in people without diabetes, including children.
A team of researchers at the Missouri Department of Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System found that diabetes appears to frequently strike people recovering from the CCP virus, Bloomberg reported on May 5, with Al-Aly, director of the system’s Center for Clinical Epidemiology ( Ziyad Al-Aly) initially thought their data must be wrong and asked five of his colleagues to do the math again.
A few weeks later, after sifting through millions of patient records, they came to the same conclusion. Meanwhile, El-Ali went searching the scientific literature and began to come to terms with the shocking reality that the CCP virus not only severely damages diabetics, but can also trigger diabetes.
“It took a long time to convince me,” El-Ali says, “that it was hard to believe that COVID could do that.”
The underlying mechanism that stimulates new-onset diabetes is still unclear, and scientists have found that some children with even mild infections of the CCA virus can develop diabetes rapidly.
At the peak of last winter, more than 130,000 diabetics infected with the CCP virus were hospitalized in the United States alone, according to El-Ali. Globally, the CCP virus has reportedly infected more than 153 million people, including more than 20 million in India, the country with the highest number of diabetics after China.
Last month, El-Ali’s study, published in the British journal Nature, showed that a three-month study of nearly 50,000 patients hospitalized with the CCP virus in the United Kingdom found that they were 50 percent more likely to develop diabetes than their control group for about 20 weeks after discharge from the hospital.
Francesco Rubino, M.D., of King’s College London, has designed a global registry of diabetes associated with the CCP virus, and nearly 500 doctors from around the world have agreed to share data through the system. They will upload patients’ known risk factors, laboratory results, clinical features, treatment and disease course.
So far, nearly 350 cases have been recorded, and emails from concerned patients and parents appear almost daily.
Rubino said, “People write to us saying, ‘My son was just diagnosed with diabetes, he’s an 8-year-old, and he just contracted the CCHD virus last month or two months ago. Could this possibly be related?'”
Rubino aims to publish preliminary results of the diabetes registry data by mid-year, with an early warning that there is enough evidence that the CCP virus has long-term consequences, and that it is important to avoid it at any age.
“It’s not just a flu, okay, you’ve caught it, you’ve ended up with it.” Rubino said, “You may not be over it. It’s a serious problem.”
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