How did I get diabetes 2?

[baroby]

About 45 years ago I had an insurance company required blood test.
A couple of weeks later I got a call from the insurance company advising me to go to my doctor-pronto.
Went to doctor, he sent me to hospital emergency dept. and next thing I know I am in hospital for nearly a week.
First day I was starved of food and drink-next day I had a glucose tolerance test. Results caused some tut-tutting.
A few days later the g.t.t was done again-the results were described as abnormal.
Asked the doctor why I was in hospital-he said we think you have a tumour on your pancreas.
The lack of information about what this meant caused me to ask at the nurse station what was so abnormal about my
g.t.t results. Did not get a clear answer. To tell the truth I did not even know what the g.t.t was measuring.
An appointment was fixed to see an endocrinologist. He explained to me that many medical tests fall within a range, and to
be outside that range depended on many factors, and out of range numbers did not necessarily mean disease.
you do not have a tumour on your pancreas, he said, and the recorded results of my g.t.t were normal for me. Don't worry about it he said,
and I never did again until just a few weeks ago when a blood test revealed that I had sky-high blood sugar readings. I was stunned.
Are those readings the same as the long ago g.t.tests?
Normal for me? What does that mean?

I don't think I fit the profile of a type 2 diabetic:
don't smoke, don't drink alcohol, maybe a few pounds overweight, but physically active daily-weights, cardio, flexibility; never had a car, walk everywhere or ride my bike to work. Do not have high blood pressure, (usually around 116/70) no history in my family of diabetes,
never had any serious illness in my life.

The local diabetes clinic advised a low carb diet, which I have been following, and I don't like it. I am due another blood test in
two months. They gave me a finger prick test blood sugar monitor, and not once have I recorded a result out of normal range.
Surely there must be some connection between the clinic administered blood test and the blood sugar finger prick test readings I get 5.3- 6.3? How do I convert those reading to blood test results?

Am I going thru' the same thing I did all those years ago with those glucose tolerance tests-do I really have diabetes, and given my
profile how did I get diabetes?

 

[mikeyB]

You don’t need to convert those fingerprick tests. That’s what your blood readings are, more or less.

On the basis of those readings, you don’t sound anything other than normal, but the only way to find out is an HbA1c test - that’s a straightforward blood test that can check what your blood glucose levels have been for the last three months. If that’s in the normal range, then you don’t have diabetes. What were your “sky high” levels? I would regard 25-30 as sky high.

By the way, anyone can get diabetes, it’s not confined to the overweight or unfit.

 

[Eddy Edson]

Like @mikeyB asks, what exactly were your "sky-high blood sugar readings" ? It's hard to say much without knowing.

It may be that this blood test was actually an HbA1c, which is the main diagnostic but doesn't actually measure blood sugar - rather it measures a proxy which correlates to yr avg blood sugar over the last few weeks.

This pic shows the (approximate) correlation between HbA1c and average blood sugar levels. The blue numbers up the top are HbA1c; the numbers at the bottom are avg blood sugar levels. An HbA1c of > 48 is generally diagnostic for diabetes, roughly corresponding to an avg BG of 7.8.

You say you're seeing BG in the range 5.3 - 6.3. You can't really tell very accurately what yr avg BG is from random fingerprick readings but assuming you're doing enough tests to pick up on peaks then it might be unlikely that avg BG is as high as 7.8.



There are situations where the correlation between HbA1c and BG as expressed in this pic breaks down. It may be that yr HbA1c is reading abnormally high compared to yr actual BG.

What I'd think you should do is keep a record of a fair number of fingerprick BG readings over the course of a few days, testing at least on waking, before eating & a couple of hours after eating. Then discuss with your doc.

 

[rebrascora]

Are the normal readings you are getting on the finger prick tests you are doing at home, as a result of the low carb diet you are following which is a very effective regime or were some of these tests before you went low carb?

Why do you not like low carb? It may be that you have been given poor information about what you can and can't eat..... in particular about fat. Most of us who eat low carb increase our fat intake (low carb higher fat LCHF way of eating), particularly if we don't need to lose weight. NHS advice is almost always to eat low fat, which combined with low carb, is pretty grim and leaves you low on calories. There are only 3 main food groups which provide calories.... carbs, protein and fats/oils. If you eat less carbs which are the source of most of our calories then you need to provide an alternative source Eating more fat will provide those calories and release them slowly and steadily, keep you fuller for longer, so you don't feel hungry between meals and makes food taste good. Including full fat dairy into your diet in the form of butter, cream, cheese and creamy natural Greek yoghurt and nuts and avocados and olives if you like them and fatty meat and oily fish and lots of eggs. Cooking your veggies in butter or olive oil makes a huge difference to flavour and hence enjoyment. I have lots of salads with a big portion of creamy/cheese coleslaw and a dollop of full fat mayonnaise. Cabbage is tossed in butter or bacon fat etc. Cauliflower cheese is a staple. I have double cream in my coffee on a morning instead of milk because it is lower carb and it tastes far better than it ever did with sugar! Do you really prefer breakfast cereal over a full English fry up?

 

[trophywench]

Would you please answer some questions?
1. When exactly do you test, is it randomly once a day, or before or after meals?
2. Have you had an HbA1c test recently? - the result of that may either be expressed as a %age, or as a higher number like eg 38 or 56 or over 100.

 

[brisr949]

Sorry to jump in on a thread to ask a question but it is regarding this thread.
Im still learning a lot and have wondered about this for a while.
So, can someone find out if they are diabetic by say eating or drinking something really sugary and then doing your own finger prick test?
Adam.

 

[Drummer]

Short answer, no. Simply because the diagnosis of diabetes is made using the Hba1c test - the other tests might indicate an inability to deal with carbohydrate, but they are not diagnostic.

 

[Becka]

Are those readings the same as the long ago g.t.tests?

For what it is worth, I was a low risk when I was diagnosed too. I never showed any symptoms but diabetes was picked up by a blood test for another condition. That is just the way our bodies do and do not work, sometimes there is no explanation.

But the two tests you mention are different.

A glucose tolerance test though is like the finger prick one you are doing at home. You fast before the test so a baseline glucose reading can be taken, then you are given a glucose solution and then tested at intervals afterwards to see how your body responds.

The blood test will be, as said, an HbA1c test. Glucose in the blood can attach to the proteins in red blood cells. Because these cells survive for around three months, testing the level of glucose gives a an average of the last three months.

This makes it a simpler and more useful test for diagnosing diabetes as it only needs a simple blood sample and as an average accounts for better and worse days.

It is also why you cannot directly convert your finger prick results with a blood test, because they are just individual snapshots. And those depend on how long or after you ate you made them, what you ate, how much you had been exerting yourself, and just the randomness of how your body was responding at the time you tested.

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

Sorry to jump in on a thread to ask a question but it is regarding this thread.
Im still learning a lot and have wondered about this for a while.
So, can someone find out if they are diabetic by say eating or drinking something really sugary and then doing your own finger prick test?
Adam.

Well, officially, home BG meters aren’t intended for diagnostic use - but I would imagine it would give you a pretty good indication nonetheless!

 

[trophywench]

You do a fasting BG test, then drink a measured amount of glucose - used to be X amount of Lucozade - then test again after an hour and that was on Oral Glucose Tolerance Test. Or, they took a vial of blood to bein with and another an hour later and sent both to the lab - but it was still only a direct BG test, nothing more fancy. The HbA1c test is taken in a different vial and the lab does a different test - it measures how much 'spare' glucose has stuck itself to your red blood corpuscles over the average life or red blood cells which is 90 to 120 days, so any time they take the blood there will be brand new cells and ones that are a ripe old age, hence the measurement they get from that test is a sort of average of what's there. If your diabetes is as well controlled as it possibly can be, the number will be lower and if not, higher.