Causes of Severe Low Blood Sugar

00:00 – 00:21 Speaker 1: Most patients with diabetes will experience an episode of severe hypoglycemia, and there’s absolutely no shame in having hypoglycemia. It’s a really common event that your health care providers really want to know about, because the best way for us to help patients with hypoglycemia is to know about hypoglycemia.

00:22 – 00:52 Speaker 2: It’s not that unusual to have fairly mild hypoglycemia in everyday treatment and those symptoms are both mild and easily treated. But as I’ve said, if that isn’t dealt with, then your glucose levels can go very low. And that can make you unconscious. And we’ll talk a bit about those those effects as we go on. So what I want to do is to frame that risk.

00:53 – 01:24 Speaker 2: On average, you might expect during care where you’re achieving glucose levels close to target, but you might be feeling low maybe once or twice a week. That is to be expected. And for many, it’s easily treated, but more severe events, which we define as needing the help of another person for recovery because they are incapacitated and is much rarer.

01:24 – 01:50 Speaker 1: Some common causes of hypoglycemia are medications that we use to treat diabetes. Changes in the diet. Changes in activity or exercise regimen, even good changes that we as health care providers might encourage you to make sometimes can drop the blood sugar a little too low. So, for example, I sometimes will have patients say “Hey Doc, you told me to increase my exercise regimen.

01:50 – 01:55 Speaker 1: You told me to cut down on my carbohydrates and my sugars, and then I got a hypoglycemic episode!”

01:55 – 02:14 Speaker 3: It’s really important to just know how your medication are affecting you. I talk a lot about insulin, but other diabetes drugs can cause low blood sugars, too. So if you have Type 2 Diabetes, it’s definitely worth talking to a provider about, you know, certain medications that might cause hypoglycemia. Can I come off of them or limit them?

02:14 – 02:38 Speaker 3: But then if you’re on insulin, the chances are you probably need insulin And it’s just really important to know how to match your instance of what you’re eating, taking your insulin before you eat, not overcorrecting for high blood sugars. There’s a lot that goes into learning how to take insulin. It’s it’s a complicated medication that you have to be a master of knowing how it works, when to take it, how to match it with food.

02:38 – 02:52 Speaker 3: And that takes a lot of time and education. So if patients aren’t getting it right away and they really need to kind of commit with working with their provider, finding educational resources to know how this is affecting their body to avoid these low blood sugars.

02:53 – 03:16 Speaker 4: You don’t need to be afraid of low blood sugar too much. If you learn about low blood sugar and take right actions to prevent and prepare, you can cope with it so don’t need to worry so much. I hope you will learn how to appropriately manage and prepare for low blood sugar and have a full life.