The paper shows that other aspects of the pandemic may have led to the increase including altered patterns of social mixing changing the epidemiology of other infections implicated in type 1 diabetes. The study linked data on all COVID-19 infections in Scotland to the Scottish diabetes register, SCI-Diabetes, using e-health record linkage.
Previous reports have suggested that COVID-19 infection can directly cause type 1 diabetes leading to anxiety and concern among patients and diabetes charities.
However Professor Colhoun suggests that “the exact timing of diabetes in relation to COVID-19 infection could not be properly discerned in those studies. The comprehensive health record system in Scotland allowed us to pinpoint this precisely - we found that there was no evidence that COVID-19 infection itself led to diabetes – instead it is clear that there was simply more testing for, and incidental detection of, COVID-19 around the time of onset of type 1 diabetes.”
“At the same time we found that there was a 20% increase in type 1 diabetes incidence in younger people in the first year of the pandemic that is likely due to altered social mixing disrupting the epidemiology of other infections implicated in type 1 diabetes.”
Links
Publication in Diabetes Care https://doi.org/10.2337/dc22-0385
Professor Helen Colhoun's webpage
Professor Paul McKeigue's webpage