A on COVID-19 patients that had been admitted to ICU, found that Thiamine Deficiency was higher in critically ill patients.
The Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital in Brazil conducted a study on 270 patients that had been admitted to ICU prevalence of thiamine deficiency in critically ill patients due to COVID-19 is higher in the people with diabetes.
However, analysis of their blood they used in the data was thiamine measured whole blood and not the transketolase activity which measures the cell uptake of thiamine, which would have been more accurate level of thiamine status.
Study author Sandra Elisa Adami Batista Gonçalves says:
Thiamine, when insufficient in the body, reduces the energy available to the myocardial fiber and may decrease cardiac efficiency during critical illness, whose metabolic demand is much higher than in the normal state. Cardiac dysfunction is a common event and an important cause of mortality in patients infected by COVID-19, which explains the idea of measuring plasma thiamine in infected patients. Diabetes is known to be a comorbidity that greatly worsens the clinical outcomes of patients with COVID-19, whose cardiac and kidney dysfunction are one of the main organic disorders in the context of critical illness after respiratory failure
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1753-0407.13156
As they have highlighted that the prevalence of thiamine deficiency in critically ill patients due to COVID-19 is higher in the people with diabetes. They want further studies are needed to explore the significance of thiamine deficiency in COVID-19 and diabetes, especially if thiamine deficiency is related to poor clinical outcomes.
Source – Journal of Diabetes | First published: 15 January 2021