Blood sugar is a colloquial term for blood glucose. Glucose is in all of the foods you eat. Too little or too much of it can be detrimental to your health. Healthy concentrations of blood glucose are the same for children as they are for adults; however, diabetic children tolerate a slightly elevated level better than they do a decreased level. Testing for blood glucose levels typically occurs following a prescribed schedule, with adjustments to insulin dosing made to account for changes in glucose concentration.
What Is Blood Sugar?
A blood sugar test measures the concentration of a particular carbohydrate, glucose, in your blood. Glucose is a simple carbohydrate found in many of the foods we eat, and it is the product of intestinal breakdown of more complex carbohydrates. It is your body's main, and your brain's only, energy source.
Significance
When blood glucose is too low, hypoglycemia results. Hypoglycemia can cause coma and death because your brain is deprived of essential energy. When blood glucose is consistently too high, diabetes mellitus results. Excessive blood sugar in diabetes causes irreversible changes to proteins found in your circulatory system, leading to pathological changes in your heart, kidneys, nervous system and eyes.
Normal Range
According to Dr. Judith Tintinalli and colleagues in the book "Tintinalli's Emergency Medicine: A Comprehensive Study Guide," normally you check the blood glucose concentration in children after they've been fasting for at least eight hours. The results, known as a "fasting blood glucose," are usually between 60 and 110 mg/dL. These are the same values that doctors use to define a normal glucose concentration in adults. Hypoglycemia is defined as a concentration below 50 mg/dL, and diabetes is defined as a fasting glucose higher than 126 mg/dL on more than one occasion, or a single random reading of higher than 200 mg/dL accompanied by symptoms of diabetes, which include excessive urination and weight loss.
Blood glucose levels in diabetic children
According to AboutKidsHealth, which is a website maintained by the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, although the goal of glucose management for diabetics is to keep glucose concentrations stable and within normal limits, diabetic children present a special challenge because they may not be able to communicate when they are feeling hypoglycemic and they may not be able to plan those elements of their daily routine--namely, diet and exercise--that affect blood glucose with any regularity, making it hard to keep their glucose in an acceptable range. For this reason, some doctors, including those at the Hospital for Sick Children, recommend that children be allowed to have slightly higher average blood glucose levels, assuming that slight hyperglycemia is less dangerous than severe hypoglycemia.
Monitoring
To measure blood glucose levels, you use a device that pricks a finger to obtain a blood sample for analysis. Diabetics usually check blood glucose levels several times a day, before and after meals. You can also check them during periods of extreme exercise because exercise can cause hypoglycemia, or during periods of high stress, such as an illness, as illnesses can cause hyperglycemia. In both of these cases, adjust insulin dosing to compensate for changes in blood glucose levels.
References
- American Diabetes Association: Living with diabetes
- AboutKidsHealth: Diabetes
- "Tintinalli's Emergency Medicine: A Comprehensive Study Guide"; Judith E. Tintinalli, M.D., M.S., Gabor D. Kelen, M.D., and J. Stephan Stapczynski, M.D.; 2004
