what causes hypoglycemia and how can it be prevented? Does a hypoglycemic reaction cause damage on the body?
In: Biology
Lots of things cause hypoglycemia. Having low blood sugar is fundamentally a problem of more sugar being removed from your blood than is being put back. Some things that can cause increased removal would be things that make your demand for energy go up, like intense exercise, or sepsis. Some drugs like insulin can take sugar out of the blood and shift inside all the cells, making your blood sugar go down. On the other side, there are also many things that impair your replacement of blood sugar. Fasting can cause low blood sugar. Your body has mechanisms to prevent this. For example, we store glycogen in our heart and muscles, and we can break this down into sugar when we need to, particularly if we haven’t eaten in a while. Newborn babies don’t have much glycogen storage, and have difficulty eating enough to keep blood sugar up, which why they are particularly at risk for low blood sugar.
The best way to prevent it is by eating. If people are unable to eat, or otherwise can’t keep up with eating alone, we can give IV glucose.
Yes, hypoglycemia is dangerous. If a diabetic has blood sugar that is too high, that’s usually more of a long term problem. Too low blood sugar can quickly kill you. When we have people come to the hospital with diabetic ketoacidosis (the blood sugar is very, very high), we take great care to bring it down slowly and in a controlled manner, because we could easily kill them if we go too fast and overshoot it.
There is also increasing evidence that babies with even a single episode of hypoglycemia in the first day of life are at increased of having lower IQs and developmental problems.
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