I am 18 and have been diabetic sine I was five. I have always been in good control, with A1cs always in the 7 range. I have no kidney, eye, or peripheral nerve damage from my diabetes. I lived quite an active life until this summer when I was forced to take a medical withdrawal from college. I have no energy at all. I was recently diagnosed with severe gastroparesis, with unbelievable emptying rates. In ninety minutes, my stomach eliminated 1% of the food in my stomach, and it was estimated that it would take 3000 minutes (50 hours) to eliminate the food. I know I have gastroparesis, but could there be another cause for this?

I would recommend you speak more about this with your physician. Unfortunately, this can be a very serious and under publicized complication from diabetes. When you have it, it can be debilitating. Hopefully, you have been able to talk about potential therapies. There are several agents that actually help with propulsion of food in the gastrointestinal tract and you can start one of these agents. A good history, physical, and gastric emptying study should help direct you and your physician to the cause, and it appears to be gastroparesis. The study is very abnormal and would make it unlikely that anything else is causing the problem. I hope that you can get on medications and see the benefit of the treatments. In addition to the symptoms, gastroparesis really plays havoc with your blood sugars. Since insulin treatment is focused on matching insulin with food, the delay in food absorption can cause lows relatively soon after meals and highs several hours afterwards. Hopefully, these findings improve with treatment of the gastroparesis.

JTL