Mounting clues suggest the coronavirus might trigger diabetes
nature.com
nature.com
I wish it was talked about more instead of people dismissing the fact that if a large percentage of those who get severe symptoms develop chronic illnesses, this is going to be a lot bigger than "just a flu". It far from just a flu. My significant other happens to be a SARS survivor who's been dealing with chronic illness since "recovering" from the infection in 2003. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
I hope diabetes isn't yet another condition that many will develop after this.
ME = Myalgic Encephalomyelitis
CFE = Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
When I got the right to vote, I also got EBV. I was stuck in bed for weeks with what the docs initially suspected to be leukemia. It tooks me months to get back to some kind of normal.
Even now I don't think I'm fully back to normal. I get tired much more easily.
Now I wonder how much data we are missing, as doctors also shrugged off my much worse baseline state, saying EBV was innocuous. But as I did a lot of sports, I know very well how it affected me. Another person on this post mentioned of their weightlifiting suffered.
We should get organized to find anything that may help us go back to normal and healthy.
There has to be more research conducted for this (and sleep disorders in general, really) because if there is a link that's the only way forward to managing it through your healthcare provider. At the moment I haven't found many doctors willing to be so speculative which makes sense - they don't know what to test for or how to treat it; so there's nothing they could really do anyway.
Personally I have found modafinil[1] to be extremely helpful in combating sleep and fatigue, one of it's on label uses is for people with narcolepsy so it's possible your doctor might be willing to prescribe it for you off-label. I buy it off the internet which is technically illegal where I live but it's way cheaper.
After your comment I did a really quick search for any information and found this paper[2] from 2018. It has some pretty big limitations, but I think it's worth doing more research.
Doctors need to be quickly educated on the known blood bio marker combination (igG, lymocytes 2% and antibody complexes all abnormal) until the Stanford nano needle salt stress test is developed and released. They need to ensure patients are put onto a pacing regime which will slow the rate at which they get worse.
Many epidemics have caused ME/CFS "outbreaks" and it has no treatment and almost no research has even been done. 5% of people recover but some also die, most are broken for life. Doctors often think its diabetes as it presents with similar systemic issues but the insulin tests usually come up fine. Its critical they do immune system and full thyroid tests and get the diagnosis and the treatment correct early as each over exertion will permenantly degrade their patients energy levels.
The evidence so far is "yes", unfortunately.
This part stood out to me;
> In most people with type 1 diabetes, the body’s immune cells start destroying β-cells — which are responsible for producing the hormone insulin — in the pancreas, often suddenly. In Gnadt’s case, Hollstein suspected that the virus had destroyed his β-cells, because his blood didn’t contain the types of immune cells that typically damage the pancreatic islets where the β-cells live.
If the virus damages the islets it could suppress insulin production, but without an autoimmune response there’s reason to be hopeful that the damage is only temporary and that the pancreas can recover.
TFA says that whether the virus directly attacks cells or induces an immune response, and whether the damage is permanent or not, are both areas under active investigation.
The theory is that the body is somehow primed to have the auto-immune response, and that it is essentially inevitable, but it takes some unrelated stress/immune response to kick off the cascading failure.
In that regard it wouldn't be surprising to see the typical rate of T1D diagnosis just happening to be triggered by the currently predominant virus, i.e. COVID, but in that case you would expect to see the tell-tale antibodies, and the overall incidence rate of T1D in the population would not spike.
Is full of people with long duration recovery periods.
Caveats are that only people with long duration symptoms would find that place and post there. Also, it could just be something else that the person is blaming on their Covid diagnosis.
Given the volume of posts on long term recoveries, it seems likely that there's more impact than a normal get-sick-for-3-days flu.
If a substantial portion of the infected also develop a host of long term health issues, what's going to be the economic cost?
We seem to have been focusing on deaths as a key metric which has made a lot of younger people complacent. Apart from anecdotal accounts, I have seen very little reporting on the long term health effects among survivors
I had walking pneumonia and bronchitis two years ago, and even with treatment it took a good 5 months to get out from under that in anything near 90% capacity.
Is COVID that? Or is it worse? This gives me more anxiety than the deaths, to be honest.
So we don't know. Nobody does right now. It takes time. It is really unfortunate that it keeps getting compared to other diseases. It's a lot like encountering malaria for the first time and saying "it's basically yellow fever". We should be behaving as though there's a mysterious new illness sweeping through populations across the world, with unknown short-term and long-term effects, because that's exactly what's happening.
The earliest severe cases all presented as pneumonia, so this disease got treated that way. But, it was quickly discovered that the pneumonia didn't behave quite like normal cases of pneumonia, and then shortly after that, there turned out to be a strong correlation with cardiac and stroke events. So, although people still think of this as a respiratory disease, there is something else going on, we just don't know what yet.
It needs to be drilled into people of all ages that “recovery” is terrible terminology. Congratulations, maybe you didn’t die but you still may very well develop lifelong conditions that really screw up your body and your lifestyle (and, if that’s not enough, consider the healthcare costs).
Furthermore, if a person’s only complaint about pandemic rules is their “inconvenience”, it’s time to grow up. No one owes you convenience, and this is definitely the point in your life to figure out how to do what’s better for society. Put on a mask. Follow the rules. And learn more about this, from actual health professionals, not politicians with mile-long track records of lying.
Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) is another one where lots of ailments seem to follow - I speak from personal experience combined with many reports both online and acquiantances.
Ever since having mono/kissing disease/EBV my body hasn't been remotely the same.
> Various viruses, including the one that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), have been linked with autoimmune conditions such as type 1 diabetes.
Btw, obesity is NOT a risk factor for type 1 diabetes.
That's not surprising at all, since there's no correlation between weight and T1D.
Children with Type 1 diabetes, before receiving insulin, look like they are starving to death.
"Obesity, once rare in type 1 diabetes (T1D), is now an increasingly frequent problem (3–5). Accumulating evidence on the prevalence and consequences of obesity in T1D shows very clearly that this comorbidity is both underappreciated and poorly understood." .... " The considerable obesity burden in youth with T1D was confirmed, also in the T1DX, where the prevalence of obesity (BMI ≥95th percentile) was 13.5% in adolescents (mean age 15.4 years), with higher prevalences in those of black/African American descent (17.9%) and Hispanic/Latino descent (15.9%) between the years of 2010 and 2012."
The fundamental health issue with diabetes is managing blood glucose levels. This is best done with low carb meals with slow carbs along with small amounts of periodic insulin. But for some reason common advice for diabetics is to eat large amounts of fast carbs and then take large doses of insulin. This combination is just begging for added weight (and increased risk of insulin sensitivity to boot).
That's odd, I've been diabetic for about 10 years now and have never heard this advice from any doctor or dietician that I've seen.
I've heard from several americans that this was the recommended ADA advice (luckily changed at some point in the last 5 years or so).
However, outside the US it seems that the recommendation has always beem to minimize carbs.
While I’m sure there are plenty of nurses and doctors out there giving rushed and questionable advice, I’d be surprised to find that this advice is “common” (though many patients may “hear what they want” so to speak).
Author is a professor of biochemstry, who is quite well known as a good scientist (but it's likely much of his name recognition comes from sharing a similar sounding name to a more famous person ....)
How could you possibly tease out that covid triggered diabetes in me when I am doing such a good job myself?
They tested negative for covid but this makes me wonder.
SARS was worse with the consequences but less contagious.
How long does this conditon last?
It can’t be that frequent if it took 6 months to find enough cases. It’s like the Kawasaki-like syndrom in kids with COVID-19. It happens, but what is the prevalence?
Just anecdata in the article and « we need more study »
That shit is enough to make me stay at home forever. Then when I do go out I see people not being socially distant, no masks, etc. hope they don’t get this shit...