A new study by researchers at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles has revealed that persons who have had Covid-19 have a higher risk of developing diabetes.
Evidence suggests Covid-19 infections are tied to a new diagnosis of diabetes, though it’s not clear whether this relationship is a coincidence or cause-and-effect.
The study, published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open, studied the medical records of more than 23,000 adults who’d had Covid-19 at least once.
Studies link Covid-19 infection with increased risk of new diabetes diagnosis.
They looked to see how likely it would be for these people to get a new diagnosis of diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol in the three months after their Covid-19 infection compared with the three months before it.
Because health care visits were often disrupted during the pandemic, many people are just getting around to getting routine physicals and checkups that they might have missed.
The researchers realized this could make them more likely to get a new diagnosis of a condition, such as diabetes, that they may have been developing anyway. To control for this, they also looked at the risk of something they called a benchmark diagnosis – a new diagnosis of either acid reflux or a UTI – as a way to address this bias.
The raw data showed that people who’d had Covid-19 had higher risks of being diagnosed with diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure after their infections.
Several studies have suggested that Omicron causes less severe Covid-19 infections than the variants that preceded it.
