Leah Wyckoff, a stay-at-home mom of four from West Chester, Ohio, knew there was something seriously wrong with her 8-year-old son Sam when her daughters—ages 7, 10, and 11—alerted her that his face looked scary.
He had been sick for about a day and vomiting frequently; the pediatrician had told her there was a stomach bug going around. Wyckoff thought he was probably just dehydrated. But when she went to look at him, she was shocked. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his mouth was so dry his lips kept sticking to his gums. “He looked like he had lost 10 pounds in like hours. I thought he was disappearing in front of my eyes,” she says.
A trip to the emergency room explained what was happening. Sam had severe diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), a life-threatening condition where the body isn’t able to use sugar for energy, and starts breaking down fat at too fast a pace, causing the blood to become acidic. He had lost 15% of his body weight, and was quickly deteriorating.
“We think your son has Type 1 diabetes,” the doctors told Wyckoff and her husband. This was surprising, as he didn’t have any of the classic onset symptoms such as excessive urination or thirst, but the diagnosis was clear. Sam was admitted to the intensive care unit to be stabilized—and put in isolation.
At the hospital, he had also tested positive for covid.
The two things might be coincidental, the doctors told Wyckoff. Or they might not be. “They explained in the hospital that most likely something in his genetic makeup means he was more predisposed to developing Type 1 [diabetes] and covid was what brought the onset,” she says. “They said there are a couple of different viruses that can bring the onset and covid happens to be one of them.”
Sam Wyckoff isn’t the only child to be diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the same time as, or shortly after, covid. In fact, Type 1 diabetes is could be up to 77% more likely in children who have had covid, according to some preliminary studies.
Covid as a possible trigger of Type 1 diabetes
Upticks of diabetes diagnoses in coincidence with covid-19 have been registered by several studies. A study done by the University of California, San Diego, found that from March 2020 and March 2021, 57% more children were admitted into the hospital with a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes than were expected based on data from the previous years. Data analysis from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), found an increased risk—ranging from 31% to 166% higher, depending on the body of data analyzed—of Type 1 diabetes diagnosis in patients under 18, 30 days after a covid infection. In Germany, the new diagnoses of Type 1 diabetes in children and adolescents increased significantly in 2020 and 2021, and studies from Norway and Finland have arrived at similar findings.
Most of this research is done through data analysis of hospitalization numbers and diagnoses, and is far from establishing any causation link between covid and diabetes. Many things could explain the numbers, says Sharon Saydah, a senior scientist at the CDC who worked on the diabetes study. It could be that covid triggers an autoimmune response that leads to diabetes; perhaps children who were predisposed to diabetes had more severe cases of covid, and were diagnosed with diabetes only after; or parents might be more vigilant with children who had covid, and quicker to recognize the signs of diabetes.
Wyckoff’s other children were tested for the four autoantibodies associated with Type 1 diabetes. Her eldest daughter, Audrey, was positive for all of them, and while she doesn’t have full-fledged diabetes yet, she is all but sure to develop it, making theirs one of the rare families in which more than one member has Type 1 diabetes. This points to the complicated nature of autoimmune diseases, and the roles that unrelated viruses may play in triggering their onset. The Epstein-Barr virus is believed to be the…
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