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