Prognosis
Two Pandemics Clash as Doctors Find That Covid Spurs Diabetes
- Veterans study shows 39% increased risk six months after Covid
- Doctors probe possibility virus harms insulin-producing cells
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When Ziyad Al-Aly’s research team told him how often diabetes appeared to strike Covid-19 survivors, he thought the data must be wrong, so he asked his five colleagues to crunch the numbers again.
Weeks later, they returned the same findings after sifting through millions of patient records. By then Al-Aly had also gone digging into the scientific literature and was starting to come to terms with an alarming reality: Covid-19 isn’t just deadlier for people with diabetes, it’s also triggering the metabolic disease in many who didn’t previously have it.