Speaker 1: It's Thursday, March. I'm Oscar Ramiras from the Daily Dive
Speaker 1: podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. According
Speaker 1: to a review of patient data, people who had COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen were at a greater risk of developing type two
Speaker 1: diabetes than those who avoided getting sick. Looking at the
Speaker 1: records of over one eighty thousand v A patients, researchers
Speaker 1: calculated that those that got COVID were more likely to
Speaker 1: be diagnosed with diabetes for the first time or prescribed
Speaker 1: medication and control blood sugar. Lenny Bernstein Health and Medicine
Speaker 1: Report at the Washington Post joins us for more. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us, Lenny, Oh, thanks for having me. Well. Uh,
Speaker 1: an interesting thing, uh, with regards to COVID and diabetes.
Speaker 1: You know, for a long time when COVID was happening,
Speaker 1: everybody was obviously concerned very much with the current illness,
Speaker 1: but there was also a lot of being made about
Speaker 1: what kind of future ailments could be caused as a
Speaker 1: result of it. Or you know a lot of people
Speaker 1: that had long COVID just suffering continual symptoms. And this
Speaker 1: new study that came out shows that people that had
Speaker 1: a COVID infection. It was associated with the greater likelihood
Speaker 1: of developing type two diabetes. This is true for people
Speaker 1: who had severe illness or mild or asymptomatic cases. So
Speaker 1: let me tell us a little bit about this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you put your finger right on it at
Speaker 1: the very beginning. You know, we hopefully are putting COVID
Speaker 1: a little bit in our rear view mirror. We're going
Speaker 1: to have some more surges, but a little bit behind us,
Speaker 1: and attention is turning towards long COVID. That's people who
Speaker 1: have suffered it beyond the thirty days or three months,
Speaker 1: depending on who you ask, and then some of the
Speaker 1: fallout from having had the virus. In this case, they
Speaker 1: did us look at very large numbers of v A
Speaker 1: patients and they found that anybody who was infected had
Speaker 1: a about a forty six percent chance greater chance of
Speaker 1: developing type two diabetes or having to go on blood
Speaker 1: sugar control medication than people who did not get infected.
Speaker 1: You know, that's worrisome. That's worrisome for your long COVID patients.
Speaker 1: That's worrisome for the average person who just might have
Speaker 1: had a mild case. Eighty million Americans have had COVID,
Speaker 1: and four hundred and seventy million people around the world
Speaker 1: have had COVID, So even a small percentage that I
Speaker 1: was developing Type two diabetes is going to be a
Speaker 1: very large surge of that disease. Tell me a little
Speaker 1: bit more about the study, because there was a large
Speaker 1: number of v A patients that they looked at, how
Speaker 1: they cross reference it with people that didn't get COVID,
Speaker 1: Just so people can kind of understand the process, right,
Speaker 1: This isn't a randomized controlled study where you, you know,
Speaker 1: set out to study, you set up one group as
Speaker 1: a control on another group as the group that you're
Speaker 1: going to study. This was a retrospective. So they looked
Speaker 1: at a hundred and eighty thousand people who got COVID
Speaker 1: that was from March to September one, and then they
Speaker 1: looked at for over four million who didn't get COVID
Speaker 1: during the same period and they compared them and then
Speaker 1: just to make sure that there their numbers were good,
Speaker 1: they also looked at a little over four million people
Speaker 1: from before the pandemic who got v A care who
Speaker 1: were similar demographically, but they didn't get COVID. Obviously, it
Speaker 1: was before the pandemic, and you know, there was a
Speaker 1: very clear association among the people who got COVID and
Speaker 1: type two diabetes. Now, you can never claim in this
Speaker 1: kind of study cause and effect, but the numbers were
Speaker 1: so large that the researcher is very confident in the association.
Speaker 1: So the advice to people that have gotten COVID is
Speaker 1: you should start paying attention to your blood sugar now.
Speaker 1: And you know, we're talking about this kind of after
Speaker 1: effects of what happens after getting ill with this. You know,
Speaker 1: now it could be a concern for some There was also,
Speaker 1: I guess a little bit in some of this research
Speaker 1: said that it could be triggering a new type of
Speaker 1: diabetes where certain cells start to raise blood sugar rather
Speaker 1: than lower it. You know, I don't know how much
Speaker 1: they know about that specifically, but more stuff that they
Speaker 1: have to look into. With all of this, and throughout
Speaker 1: all of this, you know, the people start thinking, well,
Speaker 1: what's causing it? Exactly? It's another key culprit in a
Speaker 1: lot of COVID stuff, inflammation they suspect exactly, right, inflammation.
Speaker 1: It doesn't appear in this case that the COVID virus
Speaker 1: is actually destroying the insulin producing beta cells that are
Speaker 1: in the pancreas, because if that happened, you'd be getting
Speaker 1: a lot more type one diabetes, and in this case
Speaker 1: they found it was over type two. So these cells
Speaker 1: are not working as well as they can, they're not
Speaker 1: producing the hormone insulin as efficiently as they should, so
Speaker 1: they're guessing they don't know that the culprit is inflammation
Speaker 1: either caused by the virus or, as we've seen so
Speaker 1: many times before, in this pandemic, caused by the body's
Speaker 1: own reaction to the virus. The immune system and the
Speaker 1: cells that we produced to go after the virus, they
Speaker 1: also have an unintended consequence of harming the insulin producing
Speaker 1: cells in the pancreas and therefore creating two diabetes. Do
Speaker 1: we know, if any, what kind of strain of covid
Speaker 1: this might have been, because obviously right now O macron
Speaker 1: has been circulating so much more, and we hear anecdotally
Speaker 1: right that it is a lot more of a milder
Speaker 1: case that a lot of people experience. You've mentioned this
Speaker 1: was done kind of so that was in and the
Speaker 1: height of it, probably not a lot of people were
Speaker 1: vaccinated everything, so they were getting the full force of COVID.
Speaker 1: But do we know strains by any chance with this,
Speaker 1: So it couldn't be a Macron because they went from
Speaker 1: March September, so that would take us basically through every
Speaker 1: strain up to and including Delta. Those were the ones
Speaker 1: that were part of this study. O Macron, if you recall,
Speaker 1: didn't come out until roughly around Thanksgiving of last year.
Speaker 1: And yes, it was more mild, although it was so
Speaker 1: contagious that it put it infected way more people than
Speaker 1: any previous trade. So this study, by including all the
Speaker 1: other strains is pretty comprehensive. It shows you that pretty
Speaker 1: much any strain of the coronavirus can have this effect,
Speaker 1: excluding O Macron. Well, just another thing to keep in mind,
Speaker 1: you know, if you have had COVID, obviously you gotta
Speaker 1: have to continually monitor your health. But just another correlation
Speaker 1: that researchers are starting to connect the dots with. But
Speaker 1: we'll keep an eye out of this, right right if
Speaker 1: your doctor, if you go for your physical and your
Speaker 1: doctor doesn't check your blood sugar, which he or she
Speaker 1: should be doing anyway, and you've had COVID, you want
Speaker 1: to ask for that. You want to say, what's my
Speaker 1: blood sugar, what's my humor bloom in a one C
Speaker 1: look like? Because I did have COVID and they've connected
Speaker 1: it to type two diabetes. Lenny Bernstein, health and medicine
Speaker 1: reporter at the Washington Post, thank you very much for
Speaker 1: joining us anytime. I'm Oscar Emiraz, and this has been
Speaker 1: reopening America. Don't forget effort today's big news stories. You
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