COVID Greatly Increases Diabetes Risk in Kids and Teens

As the nation searches for ways to reduce the number of young people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, a new prevention pathway is emerging: avoiding COVID-19.

Teens and adolescents were much more likely to be newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes within 6 months of having COVID-19, compared to kids of the same age who were diagnosed with other respiratory infections, a new study shows.

Researchers from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio did the project after previous studies established a similar link between COVID and type 2 diabetes in adults.

The new findings were published Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open. Researchers analyzed data from electronic health records for 613,602 people ages 10-19 years old who had COVID or another respiratory infection documented during the years 2020, 2021, or 2022. Only people without a previous diagnosis of type 2 diabetes were included in the analysis. Half of the people in the study had a COVID diagnosis, and the remaining half had a diagnosis of flu, pneumonia, or another acute respiratory infection.

The risk of being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes increased from the 1-month post-COVID mark up to the 6-month mark, at which point those diagnosed with COVID were more than 50% as likely to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, compared to those who had other respiratory illnesses.

“This is a huge spike,” epidemiologist and lead study author Pauline Terebuh, MD, MPH, told The Washington Post. “If a child is getting diagnosed with diabetes, they have a long life to carry that chronic disease.”

Risk levels were similar when the researchers looked only at overweight and obese adolescents and teens.

Most people in the study were not sick enough to be hospitalized. Overall, 14,000 who were diagnosed with COVID were hospitalized, and they had a threefold increase in type 2 diabetes risk, compared to the more than 22,000 who were hospitalized with other respiratory infections.

The researchers were not able to examine whether being vaccinated for COVID-19 impacted the likelihood of a new diabetes diagnosis, which the researchers acknowledged as an important limitation to their results. About 50% of people under age 18 had received at least one dose of the vaccine by mid-November of 2022, according to survey data that also showed top parental concerns were side effects and lack of trust.

There is no cure for type 2 diabetes, which is a metabolic condition that can lead to dangerously high blood sugar levels and is linked to many other serious health problems throughout life. A recent CDC analysis projects that the number of people under age 20 who are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in the US will increase by at least 70% by the year 2060, with a potential increase as great as 700% if rates continue to rise as steeply as they did between 2002 and 2017.

SOURCES:

JAMA Network Open: “SARS-CoV-2 Infection and New-Onset Type 2 Diabetes Among Pediatric Patients, 2020 to 2022.”

The Washington Post: “Kids and teens who get covid more prone to diabetes, study finds.”

Annals of Medicine: “Disparities in child and adolescent COVID-19 vaccination coverage and parental intent toward vaccinations for their children and adolescents.”

CDC: “Diabetes in Young People Is on the Rise” (May 15, 2024).