Can someone be both prediabetic and hypoglycemic?

Question

Hypoclycemia seems to have several distinct causes, depending on whether you are diabetic or not.

If you are diabetic, you can apparently become hypoglycemic if you're taking too much insulin. If you're not diabetic, then hypoglycemia can be caused by a variety of underlying disorders.

My question: can someone who is in the "prediabetic range" - and hence not taking insulin - become hypoglycemic under any circumstances? If so, what are they?

I guess I'm wondering if there are underlying disorders that cause you to become both hypoglycemic and diabetic, and perhaps you become hypoglycemic first before becoming full-bore diabetic (hence pre-diabetic). Thoughts?

Answer 1

First I should clarify this - prediabetic range can mean two things: impaired fasting glycemia (IFG) or impaired glucose tolerance (IGT). Both of these two tell us that a person is at risk of developing diabetes mellitus type-2. IFG means that you have higher glucose in your blood while fasting ; IGT means that your organism cannot reduce the glucose levels after sugar intake as fast as it should because the insulin response is weak in comparison to a healthy body.

Second, it i possible to have hypoglycemia and pre-diabetes. There are few common scenarios: one group of the people with pre-diabetes are using medications that lower their blood glucose as therapy (hypoglycemia can occurr as a side-effect, although rare); also, it is possible that people that do not have good glucose regulation (prediabetes) to fall into hypoglycemia if they abuse alchocol (especially if they mix it with medications that can lower the blood sugar levels).