Researchers claim that since Covid, there has been an extraordinary increase in the number of children and teens worldwide who have been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
JAMA Network Open, a monthly open-access medical journal published by the American Medical Association, recently conducted a study on available data on 32,000 young people diagnosed during the Covid pandemic in multiple countries to come to the conclusion.
The authors described the number of new cases to be “staggering.”
Although the rise could be attributed to catch-up - from backlogs and delays when health services were shut, it cannot account for all of them.
It is true that childhood diabetes instances have always been on the rise (about 3% per year), but after Covid the rate went up to 14%, followed by 27% compared to pre-pandemic levels.
Researchers from the University of Toronto strongly stated that regardless of cause, proper steps need to be taken to support the growing number of children and adolescents affected by type 1 diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes, which is when the person's own body destroys its own insulin-producing cells and the blood sugar is not naturally controlled, has no cure. Artificial insulin have be taken via injections by the children and adults affected.
The ongoing theories include that contracting Covid might instigate some autoimmune response in children that cause the immune system to mistakenly destroy its own healthy cells too. Yet the evidence for this to be true is sparse.
Another hypothesis suggests that exposure to certain non-lethal germs outside when children are off and about helps build up the immune system. Lockdowns and social distancing prohibited such exposure, leading to an underdeveloped immune system, and thus it cannot fight against diabetes.
Hilary Nathan, policy director at the UK type 1 diabetes charity Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, urged families to look out for signs of diabetes, which mainly consist of 4 Ts: tiredness, thirst, needing to go to the toilet to urinate more often and weight loss or increasing thinness. "Knowing these signs and getting an early diagnosis and swift treatment can be life-saving," she said.
