COVID can more than triple the chance of being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes within a year of being infected, according to a new Canadian study.
Men who had even a mild case of COVID were significantly more likely than were noninfected men to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Women didn’t have an increased risk unless they were severely ill.
Both men and women who had severe cases were at the highest risk. , and those who were admitted to intensive care units had more than a tripled risk.
“This is definitely a concern in terms of long-term outcomes,” researcher and University of British Columbia professor Naveed Z. Janjua, PhD, told The New York Times. “With a respiratory infection, you usually think, ‘Seven or eight days and I’m done with it, that’s it.’ [But] here we’re seeing lingering effects that are lifelong.”
The study was published in JAMA Network Open. Researchers analyzed health data from 2020 and 2021 for 629,935 people, 20% of whom were diagnosed with COVID during that time. Most people in the study had not been vaccinated because vaccines were not widely available then. The health information came from a registry maintained by public health officials in British Columbia. The follow-up period was 257 days.
The authors cautioned that their findings could not say that COVID causes type 2 diabetes; rather, in a commentary published along with the study, Pamela B. Davis, MD, PhD, said the link makes sense because COVID is known to impact the pancreas.
“Such a stress may move a patient from a prediabetic state into diabetes,” wrote Dr. Davis, former dean of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, where she is now a professor.
The researchers estimated that the increased pattern of diagnoses of diabetes following COVID infection could increase the rate of the disease occurring in the general population by 3%-5% overall.
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.