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Aim To evaluate the influence of diabetes on the severity and fatality of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus‐2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) infection. Materials and Methods The medical records of 66 hospitalized coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) patients were collected and classified into non‐severe (mild/moderate cases) and severe (severe/critical cases) groups. Logistic regression analysis was used to estimate the risk of severe COVID‐19 (severe/critical infection). In addition, a meta‐analysis including published studies reported the impact of diabetes on the severity and fatality of COVID‐19. The current study was conducted using fixed effects models. Results There were 22 diabetes and 44 non‐diabetes cases among the 66 hospitalized COVID‐19 patients. Seven patients with diabetes (31.82%) were diagnosed as severe COVID‐19 cases, which was significantly higher than that in the non‐diabetes group (4/44, 9.09%, P = .033). After adjustment for age and gender, diabetes was significantly associated with COVID‐19 severity (OR: 5.29, 95% CI: 1.07–26.02). A meta‐analysis further confirmed the positive association between diabetes and COVID‐19 severity (pooled OR = 2.58, 95% CI: 1.93–3.45). Moreover, the patients with diabetes infected with SARS‐CoV‐2 had a 2.95‐fold higher risk of fatality compared with those patients without diabetes (95% CI: 1.93–4.53). Conclusions Our findings provide new evidence that diabetes is associated with a higher risk of severity and fatality of COVID‐19. Therefore, intensive monitoring and antidiabetic therapy should be considered in patients with diabetes with SARS‐CoV‐2 infection.

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Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common primary malignant bone tumor in adolescents and young adults. However, the essential mechanisms underlying osteosarcomagenesis remain obscure. The HOTAIR, a well-known long noncoding RNA (lncRNA), is involved in pathogenesis and progress of multiple tumors. To reveal the potential role of lncRNA HOTAIR in OS carcinogenesis, we conducted a two-stage, case-control study among Chinese population with 900 OS cases and 900 controls to evaluated associations of its genetic variants with OS risk. We found that C allele of rs7958904 was associated with a significantly decreased OS risk when compared with G allele (OR: 0.77; 95% CI: 0.67-0.90; P = 6.77×10-4). Functional analyses on HOTAIR Expression showed that the expression level of HOTAIR in OS tissues was significantly higher than that in corresponding normal tissues, and subjects with the rs7958904 CC genotype had significantly lower HOTAIR RNA levels than those of other genotypes. This should be the first study to examine the association between HOTAIR variants and OS risk.