Summary courtesy of Dr. Salim Hayek, NeuroNetwork faculty and Medical Director of the Frankel Cardiovascular Center Clinics:
"The purpose of this study was to better understand why patients with diabetes mellitus are at higher risk of death and complications from COVID-19. We already know that people with diabetes have chronic inflammation and that one of the factors in this immune activation is soluble urokinase plasminogen activator receptor (suPAR), a protein produced by cells also known to be involved in COVID-19 and its complications.
We leveraged the work of the Michigan Medicine COVID-19 Cohort (M2C2) and the International Study of Inflammation in COVID-19 (ISIC), two unique resources that have made major contributions to the study of the disease, to investigate further.
What we found was remarkable: Patients with diabetes mellitus and COVID-19 had much higher levels of suPAR compared to those without diabetes, and suPAR levels accounted for most, if not all, the risk of bad outcomes attributed to diabetes mellitus.
This means that patients with diabetes are at higher risk of poor outcomes in COVID-19 if they suffer from hyper-inflammation, which we can measure by suPAR levels. Also interesting was that fact that high glucose levels, while linked to worse outcomes, was NOT strongly related to inflammation – meaning that high glucose levels impact outcomes through a different mechanism yet to be studied.
What makes this a particularly exciting discovery is that anti-suPAR therapies are already in development, which could lead to a game-changer in treating inflammation in patients with diabetes mellitus, with or without COVID-19."
