My daughter’s a teenager who has had erratic blood sugars (30-180 mg/dl [mmol/L]) since about the age of 10. She’s seen two endocrinologists who both agree they are rather odd levels, but no one really knows a cause, so i’m doing some brainstorming myself. Diet seems to play some role, but no diet seems to stop it. Her official diagnosis is idiopathic fasting and reactive hypoglycemia.

Is there an autoimmune disorder to the cells that sense the level of glucose in the blood and thus cause the pancreas to need to guess amounts of insulin to put out and cause erratic blood sugars in a person without diabetes?

Hypoglycemia is so often a repository for other problems including psychosocial ones that it is very important to be sure of the link between symptoms and reliable blood sugar measurements before starting on the long list of possibilities.These do indeed include two autoimmune disorders. The first is that in the late preclinical phase of type 1A diabetes, there can be a delay in what is called ‘First Phase Insulin Release’ from the damaged islet cells, which means that the normal insulin response to a meal is delayed, and thus can cause, a form of reactive hypoglycemia if you like it. The second is celiac disease in its early stages where the problem is erratic absorption of carbohydrate. Hypoglycemia is most often seen if the two conditions occur together. The diagnosis depends on appropriate antibody testing.

DOB