According to a current analysis, children and adolescents have a more than twice as high risk of developing a form of diabetes according to Covid-19. This is reported by the US disease protection agency CDC in the “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report”, in which the agency regularly publishes current findings. The result is based on more than 500,000 data sets from people under the age of 18 who tested positive for Sars-CoV-2.
Catherine E. Barrett’s team compared the incidence of diabetes in this group with age- and gender-adjusted control groups that did not have Covid-19. An additional comparison made with children and adolescents who contracted another respiratory infection also showed that the effect did not occur in these. This suggests that certain properties of Covid-19 are causing the effect and that it is not a general consequence of infection.
Barrett’s research group took the data sets for their analysis from two commercial databases in the USA. It was noticeable that the results differ significantly depending on the database source: On the basis of data from the IQVIA company, the risk of diabetes after infection with Sars-CoV-2 would be 166 percent higher; based on the data from the much more extensive collection of the HealthVerity company, the risk would be only 30 percent higher. The difference may be due to the fact that the people in the control group collected in the second database and used for comparison could have been sicker overall, the CDC team suspects. However, both increases are statistically significant.