Endocrine Abstracts

Very early in the Covid-19 pandemic it became clear that diabetes was a highly significant comorbidity with an increased risk of mortality in adults of up to 3.5 fold. At the same time, anecdotes started to circulate of an apparent unseasonal increase in incidence and severity of DKA in children and young people presenting with type 1 diabetes [T1DM]. In order to examine this further, the characteristics of children presenting with T1DM from January to July 2020 in North East and South London and the South East Paediatric Diabetes network, data being received on 178 newly diagnosed children presenting to 12 PDUs. Detailed data was also obtained on 150 children presenting in the same time period in 2019, a pre-pandemic year and also prevalence data from 2016 onwards. There was a statistically significant increase in the number of children presenting with DKA during 2020 compared with 2019 and in the severity of the DKA but this was not seen in all PDUs. Compared with the previous 4 years, 2020 was generally a high-prevalence year. Two children with severe DKA and shock were positive on SARS-CoV-2 on nasopharyngeal swabs. The short period of T1DM symptoms in children with new onset diabetes presenting in DKA in the COVID pandemic did not suggest that delay in diagnosis was the sole contributor for decompensation. This small multicentre study supported the anecdotal evidence of a link between SARS-CoV-2 and newly presenting T1DM but indicated the need for a much larger study from a wider geographical area. Thus the DIMPLES Study was launched looking at children presenting with new onset and pre-existing diabetes to EDs using the PERUKI Network. The results from DIMPLES will be presented separately in this symposium