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Hypoglycemia in Emergency Department
Authors: Yu-Jang Su, Chia-Jung Liao
Number of views: 543
Objective: To study the epidemiology, etiologies and prognostic factors of hypoglycemia.
Methods: A retrospective chart review of hypoglycemic cases from December, 2009 to February,
2012 was conducted to gather the following patient data: age, gender, vital signs at triage,
white blood cell count, serum glucose, C-reactive protein, glutamic oxaloacetic transaminase,
creatinine, sodium, potassium, past history of liver cirrhosis, uremia, concomitant infection,
concomitant cancer/malignancy, length of stay, lack of recent meal, status of acute renal failure
and concomitant stroke. A total of 186 cases were enrolled in our study. We analyzed the data
using commercial statistics software (SPSS for Windows, version 11.0, SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL). We
used the Student's t-test and χ2 test for the statistical analyses, and significance was set at a P
value less than 0.05.
Results: Hypoglycemia is related to several co-morbidities. In total, 10.2% of the patients had
liver cirrhosis and 7.0% had uremia. More than half (55.4%) were bacterial infection during
hospitalization. Acute renal failure accounted for 26.3% of the hypoglycemic episodes. In addition
to the etiology of infection, the lack of a recent meal accounted for 44.6% hypoglycemic episodes.
A total of 2.2% of the cases resulted from an acute cerebrovascular accident. Approximately 8.6%
were concomitant with malignancy.
Conclusions: When hypoglycemic patients present in the emergency department, physicians
should pay attention to the presence of infection, malignancy, liver diseases (liver cirrhosis and
biliary tract infection), and acute renal failure.