COVID-19 increases risk of diabetes: study

COVID-19 may increase a person’s risk of developing diabetes, a recent Canadian study found, but experts are still not sure exactly why this is.

The University of British Columbia study, published in JAMA on Tuesday, found that three to five per cent of diabetes cases were related to COVID-19 infection.

The study used provincial data and collected the health records of more than 620,000 people tested for COVID-19 from January 2020 to December 2021. The researchers then compared the data of those who tested positive (125,987) and negative (503,948) in order to see if the infection is associated with an increased risk of diabetes.

Global's Katherine Ward reports.