Type 1 diabetes: the number of children affected has exploded since the pandemic

in collaboration with

Réginald Allouche (General practitioner, bio-medical engineer)

Type 1 diabetes, unlike its type 2 counterpart, is an autoimmune disease, which often develops during childhood or adolescence and more rarely in adults. Those affected develop diabetes due to the production of antibodies by their body, directed against their beta cells of the islets of Langerhans, present in the pancreas and responsible for the production of insulin. Those affected must then be treated with insulin.

In this work, the researchers brought together available data from different countries, bringing together more than 38,000 young people diagnosed with type 1 diabetes during the pandemic. According to the researchers, the incidence rate of diabetes was increasing by 3% already before the pandemic.

But during the pandemic, those numbers have exploded with:

• A 14% increase in the incidence rate in the first year of the pandemic, compared to before Covid;
• In the second year of Covid, an incidence rate that increased by about 27% from pre-pandemic levels.

According to the authors, this is a “substantial” increase that cannot be explained by the carryover of undiagnosed cases during the pandemic alone. However, they write “Future studies are needed to assess whether this trend persists and may help elucidate possible underlying mechanisms to explain temporal changes.”.