C-petide is at .38 ng/dl....What does this mean?

I’m trying to figure out what this means. I got my test results back. My C-peptide came back as .38 ng/dl (normal is 1.1000-3.2000). I am trying to make sense of it all really. SO any help is appreciated. I can’t seem to find my answer online! Maybe I am just too tired.

Well, it looks like you are making a little bit of insulin, but not enough to meet your needs. Even a little insulin secretion helps a bit with control, but you’re still a Type 1, and you still need to do all those things that Type 1’s do!

Very low C-peptide. C-peptide & insulin production are directly related. Low C-peptide, low insulin. High C-peptide, high insulin, which is typically seen in T2s.

You have the exact same c-peptide I had when I got it measured about a year and a half ago when I realized I was LADA.

As the others said, it means you are making very little of your own insulin. I see you have been diagnosed for 4 years; have your insulin needs gone up during that time? I don’t know if still making some of your own insulin makes control easier, because some LADAs find they have spurts of insulin before it dies out completely which can make dosing inconsistent. The doctor who ordered the test should have explained its significance.

In terms of what this means for treatment? Not much at this point; whatever doses are working to manage your blood sugar are what works for you at this time, and might only change by small amounts.

Since you were already diagnosed as Type 1/ LADA, this doesn’t tell you much new information except that you are still producing some insulin, which means that you need to continue taking your insulin as before. It is possible that your insulin production will decrease further and your insulin needs will increase, but you will be able to catch that just by keeping track of your blood sugars.

If you were not yet diagnosed as Type 1/LADA, then this would have been new information!

I was diagnosed as a type 1 at 21 and I don’t know if I ever had a c-peptide test. I would be curious if I have any insulin production, but no doctor would do the test because it is not medically necessary since we already know that I am type 1.

The c-peptide as a snapshot is apparently virtually meaningless without knowing further conditions such as blood sugar at the time of test. Unfortunately, it is used to gauge the remaining amount of function left in your poor pooped out pancreas. Yours clearly measures low. Some insurance companies use c-peptide as a hurdle in approval for medical devices like insulin pumps. If you want to manipulate your c-peptide test results you can do so through diet and insulin adjustments.

I was LADA then last year was rediagnosed as type 1. I ask because my insurance company is picky about the C-peptide as that determines if I get approved for the pump or not. So when i got my results back, there wasn’t any explanation on it.

we had to do the test for pump approval sake. But I never seen my results really :)…this is the first time. So I became curious.

that is why we did the c-peptide for approval of the pump…My pancreas from the results means its pooped out and there for decoration lol.

When I had my c-peptide done back in 2008, my endo told me essentially the same thing. For me, though, it was of even greater concern than it is for Amy because, unlike her, mine came back at 1.0 ng/dl with the low end of normal being 1.1. What made my result’s interpretation problematic is that my fasting bgs at that moment were in the normal range, approximately 90 mg/dl, as I recall. The endo explained that had my results come back unambiguously low (e.g. 0.5 ng/dl) with high fasting bgs, that would clearly indicate type 1. If it had come back unambiguously high (e.g. 15 ng/dl) with high fasting bgs, they’d interpret that to indicate type 2 (a case of obvious over-production of insulin and insulin resistance). My results were not as easily interpretable. He said that I might just be someone who, when bgs are normal, produces a low level of insulin. We decided to interpret this as a case of type 1, since the metformin I was on wasn’t helping post-prandial bgs at all and it seemed clear that I was insulin sensitive.

That is interesting. My first c-peptide test, I blew a 1.8 ng/dl, in the “normal range” but low. At the time, my fasting blood sugar was 130 ng/dl and my endo also told me that was inconclusive. It does make sense that if you fasting blood sugar is in the normal range, you would not expect your body to need to excrete much insulin to change the level.

It is interesting that you got a diagnosis of T1 simply from metformin not working. Metformin doesn’t really do anything for me either. I would have thought the natural thing would have be an antibody panel.

Amazing thing is, not all Type 1’s show antibodies! I don’t know why, except that like Type 2, Type 1 may be more than one disease – there is increasing thought that diabetes may be a spectrum rather than a split between 2 types. Part of this is because they are finding more genes that contribute to both types – neither one is a monogenic disease. I don’t know how much overlap there is, but neither one is simple.

Well, I didn’t write that very clearly. I got my T1 dx from the combination of low c-peptide levels and the ineffectiveness of the metformin. That, and also my age at diagnosis (26), the speed of onset of my symptoms (within 6 months), the weight loss (~40 lbs in 6 weeks without trying), and the difficulty I had maintaining decent post-prandial bgs from dx were all contributing factors to the doctor’s decision to relabel me as a type 1. I will tell you he was appalled that I had not been put on insulin right from the start, though my non-fasting bg on the day I was diagnosed was 466 and my A1c that day was 10%. It was because my fasting bgs taken the next day didn’t reach the requisite 200+ (they came back at 195), the docs back then decided I didn’t need insulin right away. What docs (and many others) fail to realize is that there is such a thing as error of measurement – that if that blood sample had been tested 1000 times, it surely wouldn’t have come back each and every time at 195. Some would have been higher, some would have been lower. How far off that 195 was from the “true” reading (which begs the question, what do we mean by a “true” or “accurate” reading?) is completely unknown. I have argued in the past that numbers need to be seen for what they are: a guide for helping make decisions, NOT absolutes that are inviolable!