how much glucose when hypo?

jonesy

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how much glucose do you take to treat a hypo, and does it depend how low you are?

my son is 11 and we are told to treat any hypo with 15g. unfortunately this can send him sky high!

we also find that glucose tabs don't do it so much, but 15g glucojuice can send his BG flying!

jonesy
 

Spearmint

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My daughter is also 11 and i use the following figures which i got from trial and error!

5g raises by 1
10g raises by 2
15g raises by 3
20g raises by 4

We used to use glucotabs but to make it easier for her when not with me i bought a multipack of little packs of haribo sweets as 1 small pack is 11g carbs, the fruit school bars are 15g both of those will work quite quickly for her i find or if at home half a small cup of apple juice is 10g
 

leggott

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Five grams of fast acting sugar will increase my kids bg's by about 2-3 mmol, so they don't need very much to increase their levels.

I would treat a hypo more aggressively if they had only just had a bolus and then went low and give less if it had been sometime before their last injection.

We tend to use Jelly babies which are slightly higher carb than dextrose and we would only give between 1 - 2 sweets. if their blood was very low I prefer to give juice as it seems to act quicker for my children. if giving dextrose its a good idea to give them some water to drink as well.

Hope this helps.
 

Jen&Khaleb

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Depends when he's hypo. If he's hypo 1.5 hours after a bolus I'll most likely give him 15-20gm carbs but at 2am or 3am I might only give him 5gm carb. If the hypo is not long before a meal and above 3.5mmol I'll most likely just give him his meal but if below 3.5mmol I'll give him 5gm fast acting carb and then the meal and only bolus for the meal not the hypo treatment. Might depend on recent activity also. I use glucose powder and mix it in liquid or put it on some puree fruit.

15gm carb will raise Khaleb by 8mmol so I tend to use that for a calculation.
 

donnellysdogs

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Just out of interest, what do parents get told nowadays by HCP's to treat their children with to get them out of hypo's...

I know I was always told to have 3 glucose tabs and also a long acting carb snack......obviously after 25 years-I am no longer a child...but I just wondered what the advice was that is now being given????

Me personally, I have one mini milky way (Lidl own brand) and I know that it will bring me perfect no matter what....but I am always being told by DSN to have 3-4 jelly babies that push me sky high and I hate them!!!!

Just would like to know what the HCP's give as advice as well as finidng your actual postings very interesting....
 

Jen&Khaleb

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Most parents here get told to use what works best and is easy to carry. Mentos, little coke cans, jelly beans/babies, juice, glucose powder/syrup, some fruits....Lucozade isn't popular as most kids don't like it and the dental profession has concerns. There is still glucogel (hypostop) available and glucotabs but these are never very successful with parents I know. We will get a lot of suggestions here but no HCP is about to tell us what we MUST use to treat a hypo but for us to make sure it can lift the level above 4 very quickly. When Khaleb was very little milk was as good as anything but I could add sugar to it if needed.
 

Margi

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I think you will find that the advice nowadays to bring blood sugars up quickly is to use liquid if possible. Sweets without fats in them are recommended too. The thing to avoid is using anything with fats in it as this slows down the absorption considerably.

And like others say, all you can do is experiment with how much sugar brings the BGs up by how much. Unfortunately, you can only find that out by trial and error. I have no experience of treating children - I was 17 when diagnosed a very long time ago - but I believe I am right in thinking that ratios of sugar to BS levels will be much smaller in children who have smaller bodies than adults, so the average level for grown ups of approximately 10g of carbs raising the BS by 2 or 3mmols would be likely to be a bit less for children. So experiment is all you have. That goes for all of us: there are no absolute ratios that are the same for everyone.

Glucose will work quicker than anything else, but dry glucose, like glucose tabs ,is very hard eat as you get a bit of a dry mouth with a hypo and you need water to help absorb them, not to mention swallow them. Glucose needs no breaking down in the body because it is already in the form that all carbs are broken down to by the digestive system, in order to be absorbed from the blood. So a drink with neat glucose in it will work in seconds where a fruit juice drink will take a few minutes to work as the sugar in that is fructose which has to be worked on by the body a little before absorption. Either way though, the reaction is very fast. Having said that, although Lucozade is mostly glucose, I gave up trying to use it long ago for two reasons: more than a few mouthfuls is too much and you can't buy bottles small enough, and it is, for me, very hard to gulp its extreme fizziness quickly because it hurts.

It's worth taking exercise into account, as well as the timings that others have mentioned. If the hypo is after exercise, then the BS could be still dropping and need a little more to recover, where if your daughter has been watching TV or sitting in class, then you might not need so much. Sometimes when you test, you might find the BS low, but you cannot know whether it is actually recovering on its own, or is still going down. If she was a bit low, and has not been hypo for a while, the body is likely to be releasing its own supplies of glucogon to right the situation, so the recovery will be a bit more dramatic than expected. However, you must never expect that to be happening and not treat a hypo: that could be dangerous, and it's far safer for the BS to go a bit high for a short time than to leave a hypo untreated. It is quite normal to get a post hypo high and the Powers that Be generally tell us not to worry about it, and not to treat it because if you do you can start a roller coaster of BS levels which is a pain and quite hard to get back under control.

Good luck with it all. :)
 

Spearmint

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244
donnellysdogs said:
Just out of interest, what do parents get told nowadays by HCP's to treat their children with to get them out of hypo's...

Just would like to know what the HCP's give as advice as well as finidng your actual postings very interesting....

When my daughter was on pre-mix i was told that 15g of carbs would raise her by 2
I was not told anything specific just give her 15g fast acting carbs followed by something slow release like either a biscuit or a cereal bar depending on when the next meal was
 

Margi

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Spearmint said:
donnellysdogs said:
Just out of interest, what do parents get told nowadays by HCP's to treat their children with to get them out of hypo's...

Just would like to know what the HCP's give as advice as well as finidng your actual postings very interesting....

When my daughter was on pre-mix i was told that 15g of carbs would raise her by 2
I was not told anything specific just give her 15g fast acting carbs followed by something slow release like either a biscuit or a cereal bar depending on when the next meal was

Hmmm... that was pretty much what I was told about 36 years ago when I was first diagnosed! Then they forgot it, now they remembered again. But there are no absolutes. You have to find what works for each of you because we all respond differently; within certain parameters that is.
 

SophiaW

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We were told any quick acting sugary food will help to raise the bg quickly, then follow up with a starchy food to avoid a repeat hypo. Things suggested were glucose sweets, jelly sweets, fruit juice or full sugar soft drinks. I think the reason glucotabs are so often used is their convenience for carrying around with you. It's easier to stuff a roll of glucose in your pocket than a can of coke to carry everywhere you go. I don't remember if they said how much glucose to use but if it was 15g then that would be way too much most of the time. We find for Jess that a 4g glucotab raises her BG by approximately 2-3 mmol. As others have already said it does depend when last the injection was given, exercise and we also found with injections the time of day had an influence. With the pump the advice has been slightly different, treat the hypo quickly with fast acting and no need to follow up with a carby snack.