I’ve often had symptoms of hypoglycemia, even though I don’t have T1 or T2. I
This study is really interesting to me for that reason. IT’s a small one. HEre’s an excerpt in case you can’t access Medscape:
The new study evaluated just eight patients — all young women who reported symptoms such as shakiness, dizziness, headache, and irritability that they attributed to low blood glucose — and had no control group, so it’s far from conclusive.
However, while wearing a blinded CGM for a week, all participants experienced glucose values below 70 mg/dL, and in half values actually dropped below 54 mg/dL, correlating with reported symptoms.
In 2017, the 54 mg/dL cutoff for hypoglycemia was chosen for reporting in clinical trials by the International Hypoglycemia Study Group both because it presents “immediate and long-term danger to the individual” and because, that group said, values below 54 mg/dL “do not occur under physiological conditions in nondiabetic individuals,” Mongraw-Chaffin and colleagues note.
Many people in my family have had low blood sugar issues (my mom, my sister, now my wife who has a family history of type 2 diabetes). These also seem to occur in families with diabetes as well. These days, you can always test when you feel low and see if it’s true.
I’ve always heard the 70 number is bogus. But using CGM’s for the study, I don’t think they’d every get valid numbers with non-D’s because their bodies would correct it so quickly.
I mean, if they see an occasional <70 on the CGM, it might be that there were a lot more occurrences which were not actually caught by CGM.
Hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia are natural human conditions imo. Just as high and low blood pressure, temporarily high and low lipid levels, high and low respiration levels, high and low pulse, and everything else imo. The distinguishing factor is whether the body lacks the ability to correct for those issues… which if it doesn’t is indicative of a disease state…
Well it’s not just diabetics. I think the issue raised in the article is that many people (often young, teen women) will complain of these symptoms and DOCTORS brush them off and say it’s not hypoglycemia.I don’t think that reactive hypoglycemia is universally acknowledged as something that people who do not have diabetes may get.
Perhaps. Makes no sense to me.
There can be multiple reasons for Hypoglycemia in people who do not have diabetes.
A liver issue is certainly an aspect that needs to be looked at. A tumor on the pancreas. Drugs giving unexpected reactions. A number of other possibilities.
Not at all; in my working life I rarely encountered another T1D but the discussions with hypo-aware non-D’s were always helpful.
The thing I’ve always considered weird is this (emphasis added):
Yep, the people I discussed hypos with were women, possibly “young” women (one was older than me, but I guess I was a young man.)
I think this underscores a far more worrying situation; “young men” really aren’t permitted to discuss such things, but I’m pretty sure that the non-D occurrences are not sex related and I’ve seen enough “young men” exhibiting the relevant symptoms to suspect that there might be a common cause.
I think part of the problem is that hypoglycemia is like allergies. SO MANY people just say they have these conditions without ever seeing a doctor. They just decide that their symptoms match and this must be what they have, without realizing that they are actually serious medical issues and should be diagnosed and monitored by a doctor.
Also, a lot of people use these medical issues as jokes, even when they’re not serious. I’ve heard many people joke about their blood sugar being low to try to (jokingly) get a food break, for example. Or people say they’re allergic to something to (jokingly) try to get out of doing it.
I have no problems with people doing that. To each their own.
But I also do not take them seriously.
That is not what I talk about at all when I say that of course non-diabetics have Hypoglycemia. I refer to real incapacitating Hypoglycemia in people who do not have diabetes. The existence of that is a medical fact.
Of course hypoglycemia is a real medical condition. I said so up the thread a bit. And, yes, it can be very serious.
I was just adding another facet to the discussion and, in particular, a reason why many people may not think hypoglycemia without diabetes is a real or serious condition. In general, people going around self-diagnosing themselves and making jokes takes some of the seriousness out of these conditions.
And, yes, it can be very serious.