People develop diabetes after COVID-19. This may be because the virus disrupts insulin-producing cells, new research suggests.

• Some patients with COVID-19 have developed symptoms of diabetes after infection.

• This makes scientists wonder if COVID-19 could trigger diabetes.

• The first findings suggest that the coronavirus could cause the pancreas to destroy itself.

• See more stories on the Insider business page.

The coronavirus could damage vital cells in the pancreas and leave people with diabetes, according to new research by scientists.

The relationship between COVID-19 and diabetes is poorly understood and scientists do not yet have definitive answers.

But as the pandemic progressed, a growing number of reports suggested that people who had caught COVID-19 were noticing symptoms of diabetes for the first time. It is too early to tell if the condition is permanent.

“There is clearly a connection, there is some sort of mechanism that causes diseases to feed off each other,” Francesco Rubino, president of metabolic surgery at King’s College London, told Insider. “The question is whether the recent onset diabetes could be caused by this virus.”

Diabetes is excess sugar in the blood, caused when the body does not make enough insulin, the hormone that lowers blood sugar levels, or becomes resistant.

One theory was that the body could mistake pancreatic cells for the coronavirus and try to destroy them. This would disrupt the supply of insulin and cause diabetes, the scientists thought.

But research suggests something else could be happening: The virus could alter the pancreas, causing it to destroy itself.

Pancreatic dysfunction

One hallmark of diabetes seen after COVID-19 is the extremely high blood sugar levels that people produce.

These, in turn, need large doses of insulin to counter them, Shiubing Chen, a researcher in the department of surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine, told Insider.

“This suggests that there may be acute damage to the pancreas,” Chen said.

To understand what’s going on in the pancreas, Chen and his team looked at autopsy samples from five donors with COVID-19. They also donated the coronavirus to cells taken from healthy human pancreas in the lab.

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Their findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Metabolism on August 3.

The researchers found that after infection, the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas began to act strangely.

They made a lot less insulin and instead started making glucagon – the chemical that has the opposite effect.

The cells have also started to make trypsin, a digestive enzyme, and chemokines, a type of substance that indicates that the cells of the immune system are sick and must be destroyed.

It is not yet clear whether this effect is severe enough to cause diabetes to develop where it did not previously exist.

It is not known how COVID-19 interacts with diabetes

It’s plausible that the coronavirus could alter beta cell function, said Rubino, the expert in metabolic surgery.

But there could be other reasons, he said. It is possible, for example, that some people already had diabetes before they caught COVID-19, but were never aware of it.

Rubino has helped set up a registry of newly-onset diabetes cases which he hopes will shed light on the problem.

It is not known how long the symptoms of diabetes will last after infection, said Rubino and Chen. Both have advised that it’s best to avoid contracting COVID-19 entirely by getting vaccinated.

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