My six year old son had high glucose in his urine at his last doctor’s visit. She immediately drew blood for diabetes testing. We are monitoring his urine at home, until his labs come back. His glucose is very high on some days and negative on others. Is this typical? What are the chances of his labs coming back positive?

If your son has repeatedly shown significant amounts of glucose in his urine then I think that the chances are very high that he has Type�1A (autoimmune) diabetes and that he will soon need to start on insulin. There is a rather rare condition called renal glucosuria which can be distinguished from diabetes because fasting blood sugars are normal. You do not say what the blood tests were, but, I imagine, one was for the blood sugar level. You should have been able to get that result by now. Also, I would suppose that your doctor sent off an antibody test which can provide a definitive diagnosis of this form of diabetes and it would be a good idea to confirm this. Urine sugar reflects blood sugar so the amount in the urine relates to meal times, and, in general, if the blood sugar is below 180 mg/dl (18 mmol/dl) the glucose filtered is all re-absorbed. It is in fact to be expected that the sugar in the urine may be quite variable at this stage.

DOB