I’m happy to “test” any glucagon. I get enough lows at work that I can support a test regimen if needed/wanted
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Glucagon, Glucagon we don’t care about your stinkin Glucagon we got bags of Oreos over here! 
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Yum! Oreos! Donuts! Eclairs! Oh my!
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No, not at all: it is Type 3’s who don’t have alpha cells. Type 1’s do; the autoimmune response just wipes out the beta cells. The alpha cells just keep chugging along. This is why Type 1’s require such a large basal dose of insulin.
Recent studies I’ve read suggest that the alpha cell regulation is a direct product of the adjacent beta cells releasing insulin, at very high local concentrations, into the islets. This shuts the alpha cell production of glucagon down; regulates it. No beta cells and the alpha cells keep emitting glucagon so non-T1s have a continuous release of glucose. No insulin means, perhaps slightly counter-intuitively, that we need glucose (because if we had glucose the beta cells would be spewing out insulin).
That’s only the primary regulation. There are secondary factors. Low BG prompts even greater glucagon release. This is certainly what happens to me; if I do get a really low BG I experience my glucagon response and then I recover. I’ve never needed exogenous glucagon (though I have completely collapsed once due to rapidly decreasing BG).
Here’s a 2014 paper; this does not reflect recent research and the whole control mechanism is very complex (multiple controls over alpha cell activity) and apparently, even today, poorly understood:
https://bjd-abcd.com/index.php/bjd/article/download/12/38
Unfortunately there is much received wisdom here. I really have suffered very low blood sugar (certainly below and probably well below 40mg/dL) and I certainly did receive glucose into my blood by some mechanism in a few minutes, sufficient to raise my blood glucose substantially (since I couldn’t even operate my muscles initially).
T1s do have alpha cells and those alpha cells aren’t controlled by the primary non-T1 regulator mechanism, so they are always producing glucagon. It may simply be that lying on the ground unable to get up let my continuous alpha cell production of glucagon fill in the missing glucose, but I was taking exogenous insulin (Lantus+Humalog) at the time, so how on earth would that be sufficient? Things certainly works a lot better with a closed loop system but even then there is a 1 hour supply of insulin heading in even if the pump shuts down.
More research required.
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I am not sure that is completely correct.
According to this NCBI writeup:
Glucagon is secreted in response to hypoglycemia, prolonged fasting, exercise and protein-rich meals
The most potent regulator of glucagon secretion is circulating glucose.
My basal numbers are very low. If I was spitting out glucagon, I would certainly need more than what I am using.
And to their point that “glucagon is secreted in response to …exercise”. I can tell you with 100% certainty that I do not release ANY glucagon when I am exercising. None, zip, zero, nada. I have done enough testing of that. If my alpha cells were working at all, I would know it by now.
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@SobeiT Now that…OREO’s…is a GREAT idea! Why have I never used OREO’s?!
Seriously, I need to look up what my pancreas does for me any more, no insulin, very little lipase (and the other enzymes for digesting food), what else does it do? I’ll have to research it…(oh boy!)…
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@TomH Glucose Tab 4g, Oreo 8g, then when necessary I get out the big gun Welch’s Fruit Snacks 17g <<< in a perfect world Welch’s would have been 16g 
@TomH Keep your head up & keep putting one foot… well you know 
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BTW, I looked and found that there is a glucagon blood test. So this should be pretty easy for me to find out. It’s $115.
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Yeah. Exactly. Doctors don’t do math and don’t program computers. They were probably taught about feedback loops once but forgot it.
Increased glucagon secretion in non-diabetics is, primarily, a response to decreased insulin production.
That is, in fact, pretty simple. It explains all the misinformation including the exercise thing:
- You (well, someone else) exercises.
- Your (their) beta cells respond to the reduction in circulating blood glucose by cutting insulin production.
- Your (their) alpha cells respond to the reduction of concentration of insulin in their islets by increasing glucagon production.
- Your (or their) liver responds to the increased glucagon in the blood stream by emitting glucose into the blood stream.
This is a negative feedback loop; it’s fundamentally stable and because, at (2) the loop is controlled by blood glucose levels the whole loop controls their glucose, very precisely. Kill (2) and, therefore (3) and there is no feedback loop.
None of this is anything to do with the failure of the alpha cells to produce glucagon. Those doctors who understand and refer to it correctly call it an “impaired glucagon response.” The impairment is the missing beta cells.
There isn’t just one control on alpha cell production of glucagon; there are several reasons to do it including hypoglycemia in the absence of insulin. But this wasn’t designed by an engineer; it was designed by a roulette wheel, so the control paths aren’t unified.
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That’s interesting. The test will presumably be calibrated in LabCorp’s normal manner with “lo…hi” so should be pretty easy to read.
It’s this test:
Good reading on that page.
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Very good summary, @jbowler. That was helpful.
So I’m not sure what’s different in my case when it comes to exercise. I’d like to test it out.
The glucagon test requires fasting.
But there is nothing in there that says I’m not allowed to run 15 miles before the test. 
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Keep us posted on that experiment please! I’ve been wondering if the passage of time as a Type 1 will blunt or reduce glucagon production. I guess your experiment might shed light on that?
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I will definitely share it.
It will be a few months. Gonna save it for my next appointment.