New medical research has found that COVID-19 can trigger diabetes in some patients.
The health expert who led the research, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, M.D., the director of the clinical epidemiology center at Missouri’s Veterans Affairs hospital in St. Louis, says he was surprised by the finding.
His research, published in Nature, suggests that patients with COVID-19 are at a significantly higher risk of developing diabetes than patients not infected by the novel coronavirus.
According to BioSpace.com, survivors of COVID-19 had a 39% increased likelihood of developing a new diabetes diagnosis within six months following COVID-19 infection compared with noninfected patients.
This increased likelihood translates to approximately 6.5 additional cases of diabetes for every 1,000 non-hospitalized patients with COVID-19.
Doctors think the virus may damage the pancreas which makes insulin for the body. And although COVID was considered primarily a lung disease during the early days of the pandemic, it’s now increasingly recognized for its ability to ravage multiple organs and systems in the body -- that’s played into the number of "long-haul" cases, meaning those with cases that persist long after the initial virus subsides.
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