Another pandemic is about to rise in the future. But its already taunting the lives of most people around the world. Diabetes, a worldwide-known disease that could affect anyone, has a new update involving the recent pandemic, coronavirus. It turns out that once you are diagnosed with positive COVID-19, there's a lot of chances that you would next have Type-1 diabetes. Here's what experts have to say.
Coronavirus triggers a high level of sugar in the body, according to research
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Nature reported new evidence of Coronavirus linkage to diabetes infection. Researchers from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, claim that COVID-19 could make a patient have diabetes.
One example was an 18-year-old student Finn Gnadt from Germany. He was diagnosed with a positive Coronavirus disease in mid- April. After a month of treatment, doctors revealed that he also developed type-1 diabetes due to the viral infection.
Tim Hollstein from the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein in Kiel, the doctor assigned to Gnadt, suspected that the virus strands might have destroyed the β-cells of the patient, which responsible for hormone insulin.
Here's the 'dynamite' of Coronavirus
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Paul Zimmet, who studies the metabolic disease at Monash University, explains this theory. He calls diabetes as the 'dynamite' of Coronavirus for patient death. He and other researchers from the university found that dozens of people admitted for the virus were also diagnosed with higher sugar levels, resulting in possible diabetes.
"In science, sometimes you have to start off with very small evidence to chase a hypothesis," said Zimmet. "Diabetes itself is a pandemic just like the COVID-19 pandemic. The two pandemics could be clashing."
Other universities in the United Kingdom also wants this assumption to be validated in future studies.
"We need to keep an eye on diabetes rates in those with prior COVID-19, and determine if rates go up over and above expected levels," says Naveed Sattar, a metabolic-disease researcher at the University of Glasgow, UK.
If you have diabetes, you're 12x likely to die with COVID-19
According to the new data released by the country's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the study shows that patients with diabetes are 12 times more likely to die with Coronavirus.
Other underlying conditions, like heart failure, could also trigger coronavirus death for patients.
However, here's what other experts want to imply.
"Well-constructed epidemiological cohort studies and mechanistic and experimental studies are needed," said Abd Tahrani, a clinician-scientist at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.
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