A study of more than 38,000 young people has confirmed what researchers had begun to suspect: that the Covid-19 pandemic precipitated an increase in cases of type 1 diabetes in children and adolescents, a relationship that seems increasingly evident.
At first, the researchers thought that the increase was caused by the virus itself, but it is probably not true, therefore, the study, published by Jama Network Open magazine, gathered data from 17 previous studies and found that the incidence of type 1 diabetesIn children and adolescents under 19, approximately 14 % higher for 2020, the first year of the pandemic, than the previous year.
The incidence increased in the second year of the pandemia by 27 % more than in 2019, throwing some data coincide with another great study carried out in more than 1 million children and presented during the annual meeting of the European Association for the study for the studyof Diabetes (EASD) in Stockholm (Sweden), where according to the main author Rayzel Shulman, of the Toronto Sickids Research Institute, (Canada), "a much greater incidence was produced than we expected."
Before the COVID, the incidence of type 1 diabetes in children increased at a constant pace of around 2 % to 4 % per year, however, there have been different studies in which an increase in the incidence of diabetes cases has been documentedType 1 during the pandemic and “many of those cases have been presented with a greater incidence of ketoacidosis [occurs when the body does not have enough insulin to allow blood sugar to enter cells to use it as energy probably due],to the restrictions of the pandemic ».
The incidence of diabetic ketoacidosis, a potentially mortal complication of new appearance type 1 diabetes, increased 26 % between 2019 and 2020, probably because people doubted or could not seek emergency care when the first symptoms appeared.
Other factors that could be influenced are the factors inherent to the pandemic, such as changing lifestyle, changes in patterns of pediatrics infections or in situations or an increase in stress associated with pandemic."But the exact causes that have brought that incidence increase, today, are not clear," this endocrinologist at the Virgen del Rocío University Hospital (Seville) told ABC.
In addition to confirming that the incidence of type 1 diabetes in children increased during the first two years of the pandemic, they also found that the pandemic altered the seasonality of children's type 1 diabetes.The disease usually follows clear seasonal patterns, and more new cases are diagnosed in the winter months than in summer.
Metaanalysis reaffirmed that children diagnosed with type 1 diabetes tended to present more serious forms of the disease during the pandemic that before, although it is not yet clear what the sudden increase in diabetes triggered and for how long the trend could persist, Shulman acknowledges.
As for the underlying causes, Kamrath, sees “quite unlikely” that the SARS-COV-2 is directly damaging the pancreatic cells in children, since when controlling diabetes and reducing the weight, there were many expectations of being associatedalso to an improvement in cardiovascular risk.
If the parallel pandemic of diabetes is not caused by the virus that eliminates pancreatic cells, says Shulman, an opportunity opens for researchers to investigate other factors that could be promoting the increase in child diabetes for decades.
