Background (feel free to skip to the discussion. TL;DR I wonder if I am prediabetic):
For the past several months I've been dealing with growing fatigue and mental cloudiness that became especially intolerable after eating.
Initially I attributed this to my awfully fragmented, poor quality of sleep (haven't had more than five hours of unbroken sleep in over 16 months), but I eventually noticed a trend: meals higher in carbohydrates resulted in greater fatigue, sometimes accompanied by a headache and dry eyes.
This led me to suspect diabetes and so I set about obtaining the necessary equipment to carry out some tests.
Test results & analysis (all measurements are in mmol/l)
I began with a fairly typical breakfast (single slice of whole wheat bread (16g carbs), toasted, with butter liberally spread and a cup of tea with milk and no sugar)
Fasting: 5.5
30 minutes: 9.3
60 minutes: 9.4
120 minutes: 7.4
180 minutes: 6.5
240 minutes: 6.2
The next day I carried out a test more representative of an oral glucose tolerance test by consuming 50g of white bread
Fasting: 5.4
30 minutes: 10.3
60 minutes: 10.2
120 minutes: 8.6
180 minutes: 7.5
240 minutes: 6.6
I've conducted a number of tests in addition to those above, and each one has yielded similar readings. In other words, these are not aberrant results.
According to the conservative criteria pronounced by the WHO and other health authorities, I have impaired glucose tolerance and am therefore prediabetic. However, I recognize that these are somewhat arbitrary ranges, often selected for administrative convenience rather than to reflect true pathology. For this reason, I decided to consult the medical literature to discover exactly how abnormal these glucose levels are.
The three studies I looked at all equipped healthy, non-diabetic populations with continuous glucose monitors and all reported similar findings. Plasma glucose levels rarely exceeded 7.8mmol/l and they were no higher than 6.7mmol/l for 95% of the day.
So, by these real-world measurements, my glucose levels are far outside 'normal' ranges.
Discussion
My question is, since I'm not quite a full-fledged diabetic and my fasting levels are still narrowly below what is deemed impaired, is it even worth visiting a GP? I don't have much faith in the local provision of public healthcare here in mid wales. I'll have to wait a minimum of two weeks to even see a physician, and I doubt they will even entertain the idea that a 27-year-old with a BMI of less than 18 could have diabetes. And yes, I know it's probably not healthy to be underweight, but it's hard to gain weight when you know eating any sizeable quantity of carbohydrates is going to make you feel lousy.
Given the lack of risk factors (not overweight, relatively young, no family history) it's quite possible that I have some form of autoimmune-mediated insulin disorder. In which case, I suppose it's just a matter of waiting for my endogenous glucose regulation to deteriorate to a point where the disease is unmistakable.
Thoughts?
Edited by a mod
For the past several months I've been dealing with growing fatigue and mental cloudiness that became especially intolerable after eating.
Initially I attributed this to my awfully fragmented, poor quality of sleep (haven't had more than five hours of unbroken sleep in over 16 months), but I eventually noticed a trend: meals higher in carbohydrates resulted in greater fatigue, sometimes accompanied by a headache and dry eyes.
This led me to suspect diabetes and so I set about obtaining the necessary equipment to carry out some tests.
Test results & analysis (all measurements are in mmol/l)
I began with a fairly typical breakfast (single slice of whole wheat bread (16g carbs), toasted, with butter liberally spread and a cup of tea with milk and no sugar)
Fasting: 5.5
30 minutes: 9.3
60 minutes: 9.4
120 minutes: 7.4
180 minutes: 6.5
240 minutes: 6.2
The next day I carried out a test more representative of an oral glucose tolerance test by consuming 50g of white bread
Fasting: 5.4
30 minutes: 10.3
60 minutes: 10.2
120 minutes: 8.6
180 minutes: 7.5
240 minutes: 6.6
I've conducted a number of tests in addition to those above, and each one has yielded similar readings. In other words, these are not aberrant results.
According to the conservative criteria pronounced by the WHO and other health authorities, I have impaired glucose tolerance and am therefore prediabetic. However, I recognize that these are somewhat arbitrary ranges, often selected for administrative convenience rather than to reflect true pathology. For this reason, I decided to consult the medical literature to discover exactly how abnormal these glucose levels are.
The three studies I looked at all equipped healthy, non-diabetic populations with continuous glucose monitors and all reported similar findings. Plasma glucose levels rarely exceeded 7.8mmol/l and they were no higher than 6.7mmol/l for 95% of the day.
So, by these real-world measurements, my glucose levels are far outside 'normal' ranges.
Discussion
My question is, since I'm not quite a full-fledged diabetic and my fasting levels are still narrowly below what is deemed impaired, is it even worth visiting a GP? I don't have much faith in the local provision of public healthcare here in mid wales. I'll have to wait a minimum of two weeks to even see a physician, and I doubt they will even entertain the idea that a 27-year-old with a BMI of less than 18 could have diabetes. And yes, I know it's probably not healthy to be underweight, but it's hard to gain weight when you know eating any sizeable quantity of carbohydrates is going to make you feel lousy.
Given the lack of risk factors (not overweight, relatively young, no family history) it's quite possible that I have some form of autoimmune-mediated insulin disorder. In which case, I suppose it's just a matter of waiting for my endogenous glucose regulation to deteriorate to a point where the disease is unmistakable.
Thoughts?
Edited by a mod
Last edited by a moderator: