Background: 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.
Materials and Methods: The current analytical cross sectional study reviewed the medical records of 99 patients hospitalized with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 from February 14^th to February 26^th, 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.
Results: 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.
Conclusion: 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.