High blood glucose levels in the morning can really throw your diabetes therapy off track and there's good cause to be concerned. If you sleep for eight hours with high levels of blood sugar, then for at least one third of your life, diabetes will cause damage to your system. This is clearly unacceptable for the concerned patient and care-giver.
Morning levels are susceptible to being high and may seem uncontrollable. However, more often than not, it's that most of us fail to understand why morning sugars can become high.
In order to help you get better control over diabetes, here are 3 reasons that blood sugars can measure high at rise-time.
Continued...Reason # 1
During sleep, your blood sugar may decrease as a result of the amount of insulin you took that day, and the hormones, such as glucagon, that raise blood glucose may be secreted, resulting in high blood glucose in the morning. This action is called the Somogyi effect which is named after the doctor who first described it.
Some mornings, your blood glucose may be low if it didn't get low enough to trigger hormone secretion, whereas other mornings it may be high.
If you fail to understand that the main trigger is actually too much insulin and not too little, you may increase your insulin and make the situation worse.
Before increasing insulin at bedtime, do a blood glucose test in the middle of the night. If the level is low, you're in all probability experiencing the Somogyi effect, and you should decrease, NOT increase, the amount of long-acting insulin you give inject at bedtime.
Reason # 2
Another trigger of high blood glucose may be the "dawn phenomenon" which is caused by secretion of too much growth hormone during the night. By morning, it will raise your blood glucose to high levels. If your morning blood sugar levels are consistently high, nighttime long-acting insulin usually takes care of this problem and provides more normal morning blood glucose readings.
Reason # 3
Another possible reason for a morning high, not related to either of the previously mentioned circumstances, is that the insulin used at bedtime did not work long enough to keep the blood glucose from rising overnight. Older forms of insulin such as NPH tend to fall short in this manner, whereas newer long-acting insulin like Glargine and Detemir don't.
Conclusion:
High blood glucose levels in the morning must be avoided if you want to diminish detrimental effects and improve overall glucose control. Consider the 3 reasons given here to determine which of them may be giving you a problem, then take corrective action based on your findings.
