High blood Glucose

[neurotic]

My husband last was A1C 6.2 .  My question is, why is that his blood glucose is high upon waking up. It is 130 than he has breakfast and works out.  So about four hours later the blood glucose level are in the  80's.

[neurotic]

Thank you.

[Super_sally888]

Hello, that is called the "dawn phenomenon".  It is an early sign of diabetes in many whose blood sugar would appear normal at other times.  It happens when the liver dumps glucose in the early morning in response to the overnight fasting.  The insulin response to this is abnormal (ie not sufficient) and therefore the High FBS.

FBS of 130 would already make him diabetic.

Does he get high blood sugars after eating?  Time to test is 2 hours after the start of a meal.  Truly normal numbers are likely around 100, but medical profession say that < 120 is considered normal.

A1C of 6.2 is already close to diabetic.  THey say 6.3 is the cutoff for diabetes.  However, optimal A1C should be < 5.0.

For me I find I can reduce the dawn effect, by limiting how many carbs I eat.  On a low carb diet I can normalise my fasting blood sugars.  but on high calorie and/or carb it will go high.

I find that a very low carb diet is far more effective at controlling blood sugars than the typical high carb diet that many with diabetes adopt.  (ie.  American Diabetic Association would say I should eat about 240 g of carbs per day.  If I ate that much my blood sugars would be all over the place and through the roof.  If I eat 50 - 70 g of carbs per day (spreadout, of course over the day), my blood sugars are 'normal' and no-one could tell that I am really diabetic.