COVID-19 Can Cause Diabetes, Doctors Are Starting To Understand Why – BGR

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

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Diabetes is one of the main risk factors for patients with COVID-19, but from the early days of the pandemic, doctors observed that some of the people who survive the infection also eventually develop diabetes. It is a medical condition that affects millions of people around the world, and it is currently incurable.

Recent studies have shown that COVID-19 survivors developed diabetes in the weeks and months after their initial battle with the disease. Since then, more studies have been published, as doctors begin to understand what causes diabetes in COVID-19 survivors. It appears that the virus can infect cells in the pancreas, which can lead to a case of diabetes that may never go away. Doctors do not have all the answers, as there are many studies being done on diabetes secondary to SARS-CoV-2 infection.

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A report in The Washington Post looks at recent diabetes research linked to COVID-19, saying it’s still not clear how the disease could trigger type 1 or 2 diabetes. But the number of diabetes cases that follow infection important, a study indicating that about 14% of people who have survived severe COVID-19 contracted diabetes. 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 who presented with mild or moderate coronavirus.

In type 1 diabetes, people cannot make their own insulin, which is needed to regulate blood sugar. Patients with type 2 diabetes make their insulin, but it either isn’t enough or their body rejects it. It is not known what type of diabetes COVID-19 could trigger, as researchers have seen a mix of diabetes symptoms in COVID-19 patients.

SARS also induced diabetes in survivors, and SARS-CoV-2 appears to behave the same. 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 sugar levels during treatment with COVID-19. But there are COVID-19 patients without pre-existing diabetes risk factors who develop diabetes.

King’s College London Professor of Diabetes Surgery Francesco Rubino has launched a global registry of COVID-19 patients who later developed diabetes, seeking to find commonalities between cases that could show COVID-19 is indeed a risk factor for diabetes. Rubino said The post office that he thinks 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 involved in type 1 and type 2 diabetes, the cells that produce insulin. Studying these cells is the next step in proving a link between COVID-19 and diabetes. One way to do this is to look for ACE2 receptors, which the new coronavirus uses to infect cells, on beta cells. The post office notes that the research is inconclusive because the pancreas breaks down quickly after death, so getting good samples is difficult.

Researchers at Cornell University were able to grow pancreatic cells in a lab and infect them with the coronavirus. Researchers at Vanderbilt University found ACE2 receptors in the pancreas, but the study did not involve COVID-19 patients and found no evidence of ACE2 receptors in beta cells. An Italian study found ACE2 receptors in beta cells, but donors did not have COVID-19. “Until pancreatic beta cell receptors in the tissues of COVID-19 patients can be consistently confirmed by other researchers, research into the mechanism underlying the diabetes-COVID-19 connection will continue. continues, ” The post office wrote.

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

“We demonstrate that the exocrine and endocrine compartments of the pancreas are susceptible to productive infection by SARS-CoV-2, which can disrupt the integrity of β cells,” they concluded. “The mechanism of virus-induced damage and whether the infection has a direct consequence on glucose homeostasis or could even trigger diabetes mellitus remain under investigation and merit 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 in Nature.