According to analysis of billing codes from two large health insurance databases by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), US children who recover from COVID-19 may have a slightly higher risk for a new diabetes diagnosis compared to uninfected children, but the odds of developing the condition are extremely low, Reuters news agency reported on Tuesday.

In a report published on 7 January 2022 in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the CDC said that in one database with nearly 1.7 million patients under age 18, the rate of new diabetes diagnoses among the roughly 81,000 children who were diagnosed with COVID-19 was 0.08% compared with a 0.03% rate in children who had avoided the virus.

The second database included nearly 879,000 patients under age 18, roughly half of whom had been previously infected. In this population, there was a six-hundredths-of-one-percent difference in rates of new diabetes diagnoses, or 0.25% in recovered children vs. 0.19% in uninfected children.

The CDC clarified that this study was not designed to prove that SARS-CoV-2 infection causes more new diabetes diagnoses in children.

The authors also noted that they lacked information on other factors that could have influenced the results, such as the children's rates of prediabetes and obesity, as well as their race, ethnicity and access to commercial health insurance.

Researchers concluded that more research is needed "to further define the potential association between COVID-19 and increased diabetes risk" among children.