The diagnosis and treatment of hypoglycemic syndrome
Journal Title: Αρχεία Ελληνικής Ιατρικής - Year 2011, Vol 28, Issue 2
Abstract
The issue of hypoglycemia is a common problem in everyday clinical practice and many individuals visit primary health care services with the self-diagnosis of hypoglycemia in need of medical assistance. In most cases this diagnosis is presumptuous and probably mistaken. The clinician initially needs to confirm the diagnosis of true hypoglycemia, based on Whipple's classic triad, after which the differential diagnosis of the hypoglycemic syndrome can be made. The aim of this brief review is to help the clinician overcome the diagnostic difficulties using a proposed algorithm. Various conditions and diseases, and use of drugs related to hypoglycemia must be ruled out. The distinction between the two main types of hypoglycemia, fasting and postprandial, is the key point for further evaluation. After this distinction has been made, the ensuing diagnostic steps to reveal the various causes of each type of hypoglycemia and the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms are described in detail. Special mention is made of pseudohypoglycemia, a condition often presenting no clinical symptoms, although sometimes a subtype of this condition can present with intense hypoglycemia-mimicking symptoms of psychogenic origin. Finally the general principles of individualized therapeutic intervention are discussed.
Authors and Affiliations
V. DIMARAKIS, A. ARGYROPOULOS
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP113536
- DOI -
- Views 72
- Downloads 0
Measures of frequency in epidemiological studies
In epidemiological studies, measures of frequency are used for the measurement of the frequency of the occurrence of the outcomes, while measures of association are used for the estimation of the relation between determ...
The impact of the economic crisis on the mental health of nurses: A pilot study
OBJECTIVE To evaluate the mental health of nurses during the economic crisis and investigate the impact of demographic and social factors on their psychopathological symptoms of anxiety and depression. METHOD Data wer...
Psychometric evaluation and normative data for the Greek SF-36 health survey<br /> using a large urban population sample <br /> <br />
OBJECTIVE To validate the Greek SF-36 health survey and to provide general population normative data. METHOD The survey was administered to a stratified representative sample (n=1426) of the general population residi...
The contribution of walking tests in the assessment of the severity of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases
Prolongation of survival and improvement of the quality of life constitute the ultimate targets of the management of chronic respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Decreased functional capacity is the most debilitating...
Fundamental principles of epidemiological data analysis
Τhis paper provides the statistical tools for analyzing simple epidemiological data. The term simple data refers to the most elementary data that can be obtained from an epidemiological study, such as crude data from a s...