HEALTHCARE & PHARMACEUTICALS
OCTOBER 19, 2020 7:24 AM UPDATED 11 MINUTES AGO

Doctors probe whether COVID-19 is causing diabetes

By Chad Terhune
8 MIN READ

(Reuters) - Mario Buelna, a healthy 28-year-old father, caught a fever and started having trouble breathing in June. He soon tested positive for COVID-19.

Weeks later, after what had seemed like a recovery, he felt weak and started vomiting. At 3 a.m. on Aug. 1, he passed out on the floor of his home in Mesa, Arizona.

Paramedics rushed him to a nearby hospital, where doctors put him in intensive care after saving him from a coma. They told him he could have died. Their diagnosis – type 1 diabetes – stunned and frightened him. He had no history of the disease.

“COVID triggered it,” Buelna said the doctors told him.

Buelna’s ordeal and similar cases reflect a new worry about the dangerous relationship between diabetes and COVID-19 that’s being urgently studied by doctors and scientists around the world. Many experts are convinced that COVID-19 can trigger the onset of diabetes - even in some adults and children who do not have the traditional risk factors.

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