The effect of diabetes mellitus on clinical, biochemical indications and mortality in patients with COVID-19; an analytical cross sectional study

Coronavirus infection in patients with pre-existing diabetes mellitus has been shown to indicate a poorer outcome compared to non-diabetic cases. This study aimed to explore disease severity and mortality in patients infected with Coronavirus 2019 disease (COVID-19) between these two groups.

The current analytical cross sectional study reviewed the medical records of 99 patients hospitalized with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 from February 14th to February 26th, 2020. The cases were divided into non-diabetic (n=77) and diabetic (n=22) groups. The differences in clinical symptoms, biochemical parameters, length of hospital stay, CT scan analysis, and the proportion of the patients with the outcome of mortality were compared.

The statistical analysis illustrated that most of the patients were male, and compared to non-diabetic, patients with diabetes were significantly older (P=0.01). Results indicated a considerable increase in ALP, vitamin D, pO2 levels of serum and a decrease in SpO2 (P<0.05). The patients with co-existing metabolic disorders, such as cardiovascular diseases were significantly higher in the diabetic group (P<0.05). Statistics evaluation did not show significant differences between the two groups in terms of other assessed factors and CT images.

Based on the current study, it seems that diabetic and non-diabetic patients have almost similar clinical and paraclinical findings, so additional investigations with larger sample sizes are needed to achieve more accurate results.