Incidence Trends of New-Onset Diabetes in Children and Adolescents Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Findings from Florida.

Overview

This study examined the incidence trends of new-onset type 1 and type 2 diabetes in children and adolescents in Florida before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this observational descriptive cohort study, we used a validated computable phenotype to identify incident diabetes cases among individuals younger than 18 years in the OneFlorida+ network of the national Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network between January 2017 and June 2021. We conducted an interrupted time series analysis based on the autoregressive integrated moving average model to compare changes in age-adjusted incidence rates of type 1 and type 2 diabetes before and after March 2020 when COVID-19 was declared a national health emergency in the United States. The age-adjusted incidence rates of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes increased post COVID-19 for children and adolescents. These results highlight the need for longitudinal cohort studies to examine how the pandemic might influence subsequent diabetes onset in young individuals.