LAUSR

This session was dedicated to COVID-19 and diabetes, made even more poignant by the virtual format of the meeting. Juliana Chan (The Hong Kong Institute of Diabetes and Obesity, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong), provided an overview of the current evidence linking the overlapping characteristics of COVID-19 and diabetes. For example, both diseases disproportionately affect vulnerable populations such as specific ethnicities, individuals of low socioeconomic status, and those with poor access to healthcare. Indeed, the term syndemic would be a more appropriate description of the current crisis; a clustering of biological and environmental factors that worsen the outcomes of coexisting diseases. Chan presented findings from a pair of papers recently published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology. The first, by Holman et al., comprised a UK COVID-19 population study reporting a marked increase in deaths of people with Type 1 diabetes (T1D) and Type 2 diabetes (T2D) in 2020 compared to mean deaths in 2017 19, with a large proportion being attributable to COVID-19. This was echoed in the second paper by Barren et al., reporting that out of 23698 in-hospital COVID-19-related deaths in the UK, 1.5% had T1D and 31.4% had T2D. Alarmingly, when adjusted for age, race, sex and other comorbidities, individuals with T1D actually had a higher risk of in-hospital death related to COVID-19 (odds ratio (OR) of 3.51), compared to individuals with T2D (OR of 2.03). Therefore, glucose control is an immediate modifiable risk factor for people with diabetes who are trying to optimize their health during the current pandemic. Daniel Drucker (Mt. Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada) then presented a fascinating talk that summarized the latest evidence indicating that COVID-19 and T2D have shared molecular pathways, which might help or hinder therapeutic strategies. As previously discussed by Chan, the level of glycaemic control in people with diabetes is related to the severity of the outcome following SARS-CoV-2 infection. Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is a molecule with key