Hypoglycemia
The first time a person with diabetes gets a low
glucose reaction—usually at a glucose level of about 54
mg/dl, he or she usually gets shaky, sweaty, and hungry.
Other symptoms include anxiety and nausea. These are
very uch like the symptoms you get when you are
extremely nervous and are called autonomic symptoms. It’s
your body’s way of telling you that your glucose is low
and you should eat. If these autonomic symptoms are
ignored, the glucose levels fall into a range where the
brain is starved of energy (around glucose value of 49
mg/dl) and you feel irritable, you can’t think clearly,
your vision is blurred, you feel tired, you have a
headache, and you have difficulty speaking. These are
called neuroglycopenic symp-toms
.
When the symptoms are severe, they can prevent you from
treating the low glucose levels, and if the glucose level
falls even further, into the less-than-30 range, you can
lose consciousness or even have a
seizure.
If you have had diabetes a very long time and/or
have had several recent low glucose reactions, you may
not get the autonomic symptoms, or they may occur at
lower glucose levels. So often the first indication that
your glucose is low may be neuroglycopenic symptoms such
as feeling tired or having blurred vision. Occasionally
patients tell that they had a
glucose measurement in the 30s and they felt fine. This
inability to recognize hypoglycemia until the levels are
very low is known as hypoglycemic unawareness, and it is
of concern because the glucose levels only have to fall a
little further before there is loss of
consciousness.
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