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 People with diabetes can develop hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar,
if they skip a meal, exercise harder than usual or take too much
insulin or other diabetes medications.
Low blood sugar can cause fatigue, anxiety, rapid heartbeat,
sweating, mental confusion or even coma or seizures if not treated
quickly.
For a new study, researchers pooled data from four papers in the
medical literature that compared the effect of dietary sugars and
glucose tablets on relieving low blood sugar symptoms, including
three randomized trials, which are generally the most reliable kind
of medical study.
As reported in the Emergency Medicine Journal, the adults and
children in the studies had type 1 or type 2 diabetes. All of them
were awake throughout their episodes of low blood sugar.
Altogether, 515 low blood sugar episodes were treated with dietary
sugar and 232 were treated with glucose tablets.
Across the four studies, different forms of dietary sugars were
used, including Skittles candies, orange juice, Mentos candies,
jelly beans, cornstarch, milk and glucose gels.
In general, the individual substances were about as effective as the
glucose tablets for getting blood sugar levels to rise.
When results from all four studies were combined, neither dietary
sugars nor glucose tablets reliably returned blood sugar levels to
normal within 10 to 15 minutes, according to the research team.
"Regardless of the oral (method) used to treat hypoglycemia, time is
required for absorption before the measured blood returns to the
normal range and the patient’s symptoms improve," the authors wrote.
However, people who used glucose tablets seemed to feel better
faster. Patients who used sugary foods were 11 percent less likely
to feel relief from their symptoms within 15 minutes.
Glucose tablets are available in drugstores and online. Prices on
Amazon.com range from about $5 for a pack of 10 tablets, to about $9
for a bottle of 50.
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“Although the results lean toward glucose tablets, everybody reacts
differently to low blood sugar,” said Susan Renda, a certified
diabetes educator at Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Diabetes Center who
was not involved with the study.
“We can’t say that this study controls for individual differences in
low blood sugar, like measuring a patient’s glucose level or
checking to see how they feel,” she told Reuters Health.
“We don’t want to discourage people from using dietary sugars,” said
study co-author Dr. Jestin Carlson, an emergency physician at Saint
Vincent Hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania.
“Glucose tablets seem to work better, but if you’re using dietary
sugar, that’s OK too,” he told Reuters Health by phone.
What’s most important is to treat low blood sugar right away,
according to Renda. She said, “Whether it’s Skittles or glucose
tablets, people should carry something with them at all times for
whenever they feel a drop in blood sugar.”
As of 2014, approximately 29 million Americans - about 9 percent of
the U.S. population – had been diagnosed with diabetes, according to
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2dELvhQ Emergency Medicine Journal, online
September 19, 2016.
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
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