COVID-19 can cause diabetes, and doctors are beginning to understand why – BGR

• Diabetes is a significant risk factor for COVID-19, but doctors warn that coronavirus survivors may also develop diabetes after eliminating a covid infection.
• Some researchers believe that the new coronavirus may cause a variation in diabetes that may not fall into the current categories of type 1 or type 2. Instead, it could be a combination of the two.
• It is unclear whether diabetes after COVID-19 is transient or permanent, but one study showed that the virus can infect the pancreatic cells involved in insulin production.

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Diabetes is one of the major risk factors for patients with COVID-19, but from the first days of the pandemic, doctors have noticed that some of the people who survive the infection end up developing diabetes as well. This is a condition that affects millions of people around the world and is currently incurable.

Recent studies have shown that COVID-19 survivors developed diabetes in the weeks and months following their initial attack of the disease. Since then, additional studies have been published as doctors begin to understand what causes diabetes in COVID-19 survivors. It seems that the virus can infect the cells of the pancreas and this can lead to a case of diabetes that can never go away. Doctors do not have all the answers, because there are a lot of studies in the analysis of diabetes secondary to SARS-CoV-2 infection.

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A report in Washington Post examines recent research on COVID-19 diabetes, saying it is still unclear how the disease could trigger type 1 or type 2 diabetes. But the number of cases of diabetes following infection is significant, with a study showing that about 14% of people who survived severe COVID-19 had diabetes. The researchers looked at data from more than 3,700 patients and found that COVID-19 could be the reason these patients developed diabetes.

But new cases of diabetes have also been observed in patients with mild or moderate coronavirus.

In type 1 diabetes, people cannot produce their own insulin, which is needed to regulate blood sugar. Patients with type 2 diabetes produce their insulin, but it is either insufficient or their body rejects it. It is unclear what type of diabetes could trigger COVID-19, as researchers have seen a mixture of diabetes symptoms in patients with COVID-19.

SARS has also induced diabetes in survivors, and SARS-CoV-2 appears to have the same behavior. The report notes that many people who develop diabetes during or after COVID-19 have risk factors for diabetes, including obesity or a family history. The use of dexamethasone may also increase blood glucose during COVID-19 therapy. But there are patients with COVID-19 without pre-existing diabetes risk factors who develop diabetes.

Francesco Rubino, a professor of diabetes surgery at King’s College London, has started a global registry of COVID-19 patients who later developed diabetes, seeking to find common ground between cases that could show that COVID-19 is in indeed a risk factor for diabetes. Rubino said Bar that he believes that COVID diabetes could be different from type 1 and type 2 because it could be a hybrid form. “It’s worrying,” he told the newspaper.

The report explains that pancreatic beta cells are at play in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, the cells that produce insulin. The next step in demonstrating a link between COVID-19 and diabetes is to study these cells. One way to do this is to look for ACE2 receptors, which the new coronavirus uses to infect cells, on beta cells. Bar notes that the research is inconclusive, as the pancreas decomposes rapidly after death, so obtaining good evidence is a challenge.

Researchers at Cornell University were able to grow pancreatic cells in a laboratory and infect them with coronavirus. Vanderbilt University researchers found ACE2 receptors in the pancreas, but the study did not involve patients with COVID-19 and found no evidence of ACE2 receptors in beta cells. A study in Italy found ACE2 receptors in beta cells, but donors did not have COVID-19. Until receptors in pancreatic beta cells in tissue from patients with COVID-19 can be consistently confirmed by other researchers, the hunt for the mechanism underlying the diabetes-COVID-19 connection continues. Bar wrote.

But researchers at Ulm University Hospital could have proved just that. COVID-19 infection can lead to the destruction of beta cells, which can lead to diabetes. The researchers showed that human beta cells express viral entry proteins or ACE2, and the infection can alter the function of beta cells. Scientists have shown that coronavirus could infect the human exocrine (pancreatic juice in digestion) and the endocrine pancreas (hormones such as insulin and glucagon) in both ex vivo and in vivo experiments. “Infection is associated with morphological, transcriptional and functional changes, including a reduced number of insulin-secreting granules in [beta cells] and affects glucose-stimulated insulin secretion, ”they wrote.

“We have shown that the exocrine and endocrine compartments of the pancreas are susceptible to productive SARS-CoV-2 infection, which can disrupt β cell integrity,” they concluded. The mechanism of damage caused by the virus and whether the infection has a direct consequence for glucose homeostasis or may even trigger diabetes remain under discussion and is worth further study.

Interestingly, the researchers also showed that remdesivir in ex vivo experiments led to inhibition of viral replication, but this did not lead to a “complete rescue” of beta cell function. The full study is available at The nature.