Diabetes as a risk factor of death in hospitalized COVID-19 patients - an analysis of a National Hospitalization Database from Poland, 2020

Diabetes is one of the comorbidities associated with poor prognosis in hospitalized COVID-19 patients. In this nationwide retrospective study, we evaluated the risk of in-hospital death attributed to diabetes. We analyzed data from discharge reports of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in 2020 as submitted to the Polish National Health Fund. Several multivariate logistic regression models were used. In each model, in-hospital death was estimated with explanatory variables. Models were built either on the whole cohorts or cohorts matched with propensity score matching (PSM). The models examined either the main effects of diabetes itself or the interaction of diabetes with other variables. We included 174,621 patients with COVID-19 who were hospitalized in the year 2020. Among them, there were 40,168 diabetic patients (DPs), and the proportion of DPs in this group was higher than in the general population (23.0% vs. 9.5%, p