What is Hypoglycemia?
Types of Hypoglycemia
Reactive Hypoglycemia
Fasting hypoglycemia
Diagnosis
Fasting Hypoglycemia
In Fasting hypoglycemia, symptoms appear when you haven't eaten for five hours or more since your last meal. Five hours after eating, most people will be hungry-after all, five hours is about the normal distance between lunch and dinner-but if you are having some or many of the symptoms of hypoglycemia mentioned on the home page of this web site, that's not normal.
Fasting hypoglycemia often appears as one of many symptoms of very serious diseases like liver disease (including alcohol-induced damage), cancer, tumours of the pancreas and thyroid deficiency. If this is what you are experiencing, you probably already know you're sick because hypoglycemia won't be your first symptom. See your doctor immediately if you think this could apply to you!
Diagnosis
Doctors are reluctant to diagnose anything without a corroborating test result, which makes perfect sense. In the case of hypoglycemia, unfortunately, the test result is not conclusive because people can have the symptoms at blood sugar levels ranging from 80mg/dl down to 30mg/dl and below.
I can understand why doctors would like to set limits that define a blood glucose level that defines the line between "Yes, you have hypoglycemia" and "No, you don't have hypoglycemia". But it still seems strange to me that although we know that different people react differently to many things, it still seems to be so hard to understand that what one person's body interprets as a low blood sugar level is perfectly acceptable to another.
Your doctor may make a distinction between the types of hypoglycemia. Nevertheless, with the exceptions of fasting hypoglycemia, where there may be severe underlying conditions to treat, or drug or alcohol induced hypoglycemia, where the cause must be found in order to avoid recurrence, the type of hypoglycemia you have is unimportant. All other types of hypoglycemia are always treated the same way-with diet.
If you think you have fasting hypoglycemia or if you have hypoglycemic episodes related to alcohol or drugs, please see your doctor as soon as possible. You may need to change your diet, but you really need to deal with the underlying causes of your hypoglycemia first.