Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/18/covid-19-doubles-the-risk-of-children-developing-type-1-diabetes.html
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The headline feels wrong.
It doesn’t increase the chance of developing Type 1 diabetes. Rather, it accelerates the appearance of symptoms in a child that HAS asymptomatic Type 1 diabetes.
Or am I misreading the study info?
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Yep - that’s my take too.
Covid-19 is an all-round very nasty virus, what with all the things it can fuck up inside us.
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I’m only clinical studywork adjacent, so I can’t read this and understand enough of the details, but the first thing I recall my study people saying whenever we talk is “sample size”. I’m wondering if their sample size was enough and diverse enough.
I look forward to hearing more though - 4 years ago this disease didn’t exist and while we need to know more about it, I worry that we make too many assumptions too quickly.
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Type1 diabetes is a genetically linked disease. Covid infection, like all viral infections, spurs the immune system, and in severe infections, can bring about the manifestation of type1 DM earlier. because covid is a new virus to humanity, it gets giant immune responses (see Pandemic, early years). This has been clear since early in the pandemic, with ‘new onset’ diabetes growing in response to the infection rate, but delayed. No one can be sure if all those people would have manifest eventually, or how soon, but it changed the onset numbers so it seems pretty causal. This is the first time I’ve seen actual percentage risk, esp associated with children. It takes awhile to gather good data and write papers.
It’s most commonly linked with genetics but can also be caused by other factors. There is no known relative in my family for example who has type 1 diabetes other than me.
It’s unlikely we wll ever know what caused me to become diabetic.
Which fits in with how the growth of type1 DM has surpassed what it “should be” going by hereditary genertics only - there’s something more causing it to be more common. But that’s been going on since well before covid.
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