COVID-19 may increase the risk of type 1 diabetes in kids

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-09-24 01:00

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US scientists say catching COVID-19 may make children more likely to develop type 1 diabetes. Diagnoses of the disease increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, so the researchers set out to see if kids who had contracted COVID-19 were more likely to receive a subsequent type 1 diabetes diagnosis than children with other respiratory diseases. They looked at data for 1,091,494 US kids, 314 917 of whom had contracted COVID-19 and 776,577 of whom had not contracted COVID-19 but had caught other respiratory infections. Six months after infection, 123 kids in the COVID-19 group (0.043%) had received a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes, while only 72 (0.025%) in the non-COVID-19 group had. At three time points investigated - one, three and six months - kids with COVID-19 were more likely to have type 1 diabetes than those in the non-COVID-19 group. Although this type of study can't show that COVID-19 actually caused the increased risk of type 1 diabetes, the findings raise concern for long-term, post–COVID-19 autoimmune complications in children, the scientists say.