VIDEO: Stress related to COVID-19 pandemic impacted diabetes

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The answer to that is really more that COVID-19 has had yet another detrimental effect, in addition to the societal ones that I talked about earlier, are over nutrition and our decreased physical activity levels, which have promoted overweight, obesity, which in turn leads to diabetes, COVID-19 was yet another stressor that either unmasked diabetes in people who had it but just didn't know it or actually increased the risk of developing diabetes, both in people who had pre-diabetes, in other words, their blood sugars were elevated but not high enough to cause diabetes, but then in the setting of COVID, which was to some extent and depending on the phase of the COVID you're talking about, just was a stressor, it caused inflammation and that is one of the, again, underlying risk factors for the development of type two diabetes. So we saw a burst of increased cases of diabetes along with COVID, and in addition, because it was such a stressor, we started seeing people develop ketoacidosis with type two diabetes even, and especially in type one when they had this superimposed disease. So I think that that is the interface between COVID and diabetes. When the COVID went away, in some cases, the diabetes went away, but in a lot of other cases for type two diabetes, the diabetes was then fully entrenched and remained even after COVID had been successfully either treated or been cured, essentially. So COVID was just yet another stressor in a population that was vulnerable. This is true, also, the stress that goes along with COVID is true of many stressors, I mean, people get put on a steroid, for example, they get an injection into a joint, 'cause they have arthritis, but that steroid sticks around for a while and it doesn't just stay in the joint, it kind of leaks out a little bit and before you know it, people who maybe may have been at risk for diabetes then develop it! The effect of the steroid dissipates, the same way as the stress effect from COVID dissipates, and the diabetes either can go away or get better, but not infrequently, it's still there, once it's clinically emerged.