Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: The available questionnaires for the detection of hypoglycemia are designed for patients with type 1 Diabetes (T1DM), and do not take into account some characteristics of patients with type 2 Diabetes (T2DM). For instance most of T2DM patients do not perform capillary blood glucose self-monitoring as part of their daily treatment and hypoglycemia might be underestimated. Nevertheless, hypoglycemia can have a negative impact on T2DM patients, in terms of increasing the risk of dementia and mortality. For this reason, a questionnaire was designed to assess the frequency and severity of hypoglycemia in T2DM.

Methods: A prospective study was performed based on the completion of a questionnaire in patients with T1DM and T2DM between July and December 2016.

Results: 310 patients were evaluated (160 with T2DM, 76% of which were under insulin treatment). A total of 53.75% of the patients with T2DM reported at least one episode of hypoglycemia in the last six months (88% treated with insulin), and 20% of the patients had symptoms of nocturnal hypoglycemia. Notably, a 33% of the patients with T2DM reported episodes of asymptomatic hypoglycemia. Regarding the severity, 10.6% of patients with T2DM reported at least one episode of hypoglycemia that required assistance of a third person (vs 17.4% of T1DM) and 3.7% of patients presented an episode that required medical assistance (vs. 3.3% of T1DM). We observed a tendency to underestimation of the hypoglycemic events (both by the patient and the physician) in T2DM patients compared to T1DM: 1/3 of patients with T2DM with nocturnal hypoglycemia did not report it to their endocrinologist and in 1/3 of the cases, the physician did not question about hypoglycemia episodes.

Conclusions: This study shows that a significant percentage of T2DM patients had suffered episodes of hypoglycemia, sometimes severe or nocturnal. A questionnaire aimed at the detection of hypoglycemia in T2DM could be useful, although more studies are necessary for its validation.