Clinical Characteristics and Outcomes of Coronavirus Disease 2019 Infections among Diabetics: a Retrospective and Multicenter Study in China.

Yi, Huahua; Lu, Fangying; Jin, Xiaoyan; Chen, Rong; Liu, Bing; Dong, Xuan; Xiong, Weining; Yang, Dexiang; Guo, Yi; Zhou, Min

BACKGROUND Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) emerged in Dec 2019 and has spread globally. Diabetics are at increased risk of infections caused by a variety of pathogens including virus. The present research was aimed to describe clinical characteristics and outcomes of COVID-19 patients with diabetes. METHODS A retrospective multicenter study of COVID-19 patients with diabetes was conducted in four hospitals in Wuhan, Shanghai and Anhui Province. RT-PCR or next generation sequencing was executed to confirm the existence of SARS-CoV-2 from respiratory specimens. RESULTS 54 diabetics (10.36%) were recruited from 521 COVID-19 patients, with a median age of 63 (IQR, 52-70) years. Among them, 51 were previously diagnosed with diabetes and 3 were newly diagnosed based on HbA1c over 6.5%. For COVID-19, 47 of the 54 patients had an exposure history. Fever (47/54, 87.04%), dry cough (36/54, 66.67%) and expectoration (21/53, 39.62%) were among the top three symptoms. Lung infiltration was bilateral (46/52, 88.46%) and multilobe (47/52, 90.38%), and ground-glass opacity (36/37, 97.30%) was the most common pattern in radiological images. Besides, COVID-19 patients with diabetes were prone to be classified as severe or critical type (46.30%, 25/54) and complicated with acute lung injury, acute respiratory distress syndrome and acute kidney injury. The proportion of ICU admission and death among the COVID-19 diabetics were 14.81% (8/54) and 12.96% (7/54), respectively. CONCLUSIONS With older age, diabetics diagnosed as COVID-19 were prone to developing into severe type, and exhibited a high rate of ICU admission and mortality. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.