My 12 year old son who has had type 1 diabetes for a year and a half. He wets the bed almost every night with huge amounts of urine. He has wet the bed since he was a baby. I checked for sugar in his urine and was 2000. Does every child with diabetes have sugar in his or her urine? Is that why he is wetting so much at night? Even his arms are dripping when he wakes up, and he is getting very frustrated and discouraged by this.

Your son’s glucose control is likely not well balanced overnight. You should do a series of several blood glucose readings overnight and then redistribute or change his food and/or insulin to get better overnight control. Working closely with your diabetes team should help you accomplish this, but often you need supper and/or bedtime doses of insulin to get overnight control or more units if you are already doing this. If glucose control is okay and well documented on several nights, then he may merely need something like DDAVP or Tofranil or a combination as a bedtime dose to decrease urinary output.

Make sure that your diabetes team knows of these problems so that they can help you solve them.

SB

[Editor’s comment: Your son’s situation might well be clarified by monitoring sugar levels continuously for several days to try to sort out what’s happening in more detail. See The Continuous Glucose Monitoring System
SS]