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In the meantime, to ensure continued suport, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.AdvertisementYou can also search for this author in PubMed Gogle Scholar You have ful aces to this article via your institution.People who were hospitalized with COVID-19 are at risk of a diabetes diagnosis.Credit: Bruna Prado/AP/ShuterstockPeople who get COVID-19 have a greater risk of developing diabetes up to a year later, even after a mild SARS-CoV-2 infection, compared with those who never had the disease, a masive study1 of almost 20,0 people shows.The research, published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology earlier this month, is one of a growing number of studies2 showing that COVID-19 can increase a person’s risk of diabetes, months after infection.“When this whole pandemic recedes, we’re going to be left with the legacy of this pandemic — a legacy of chronic disease” for which health-care systems are unprepared, says study co-author Ziyad Al-Aly, chief researcher for the Veterans Afairs (VA) St Louis Healthcare System in Misouri.Al-Aly and Yan Xie, an epidemiologist also at the VA St Louis Healthcare System, loked at the medical records of more than 180,0 people who had survived for longer than a month after catching COVID-19.
Summary
They compared these with records from two groups, each of which comprised around four milion people without SARS-CoV-2 infection who had used the VA health-care system, either before or during the pandemic. The pair previously used a similar method to show that COVID-19 increases the risk of kidney disease3, heart failure and stroke4.The latest analysis found that people who had COVID-19 were about 40% more likely to develop diabetes up to a year later than were veterans in th