Possible diabetes

My 6 year old is 17.9kg. She has experienced a lot of random episodes over the past year with out of the blue stomach pain and vomiting. Sometimes she comes right instantly. Other times she takes a day or so to settle the fatigue/exhaustion/washed out looking. She always eats and drinks well and we don’t have excessive drinking or urinating but maybe a wee bit more than normal the last few days.
She started randomly vomiting Tuesday and has vomited 4 times Tuesday and Wednesday. It has a pattern of her eating normally, then a couple of hours later she starts having abdominal pain, and proceeds to vomit. She then comes right again, only to do the same thing after the next meal.
I decided to check her urine Tuesday night and found traces of glucose in her urine and traces of ketones.
Fast forward to Wednesday and she developed a terrible headache. It had her in excruciating pain and all she wanted to do was sleep unless she was full of ibuprofen.
Blood sugar was 4.8 wednesday morning and I thought she was gunna be fine but didn’t get better.
She’s had high ketones in her urine all day, then Wednesday night they were the highest on the strip so +4. I checked her blood sugar at an hour after eating and it was 11.5.
She continued to have a terrible headache and Thursday’s Fasting blood glucose was 5.8.
The rest of the day her BGs were around the 5.1 - 5.8 mark so nothing unusual.
Took her to the docs and had bloodwork done. She continued to have these horrible headaches and just wanted to sleep.
She stopped eating at 4.30pm Thursday night and at 7am Friday morning she had a blood glucose of 5.4 with +++ ketones. Hba1c came back at 5.1. And the highest blood glucose we have had this weekend was this afternoon at 8.2 an hour after a couple of small biscuits.

Has anyone else been here? Did it turn out to be diabeties or something else??

I’m linking in comments from the duplicate thread posted:

Again, recommend you see a doctor about this.

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It will be good to wait for the doctor’s bloodwork to come back as she may be developing diabetes. Some diabetics (I do) sometimes get ketones with normal blood glucose levels - it is called euglycemic ketoacidosis - and you do need to be concerned about it. With diabetes the treatment is to eat some carbs and to dose insulin for it. Low carbs can also lead to a natural ketosis that is dietary caused by the body prioritizing fats over carbs for food so you need to look at what your daughter is eating to determine if that is part of the problem.

The nausea and vomiting and head ache are definitely symptoms of ketoacidosis - BUT they are also symptoms of a lot of other conditions. Have you got the blood work back yet? If not, they may reveal the problem.

One thing to consider - she may have developed another auto-immune condition - celiac disease. Unfortunately it is also one of the ones that people with diabetes can get more often than non-diabetics. It manifests with those same systems. Basically, the digestive tract is unable to digest wheat, rye or barley proteins called gliadin and other ‘glutens’ and their presence in her digestive system actually inflames the digestive track that it ‘leaks’ food metabolites into other parts of her body where they cause a great deal of distress. There is also non-celiac gluten intolerance although its symptoms tend not to be so acute.

It could also be that her pancreas has insufficient exocrine functions. That means that the pancreas does not produce the digestive enzymes necessary to break down proteins, carbohydrates and especially fats causing malabsorption and nutritional deficiencies. This would definitely cause digestive upsets and the build up of toxins could cause headaches as well. This is easily remedied by adding special digestive enzymes before anything is eaten.

She could also have some sort of other food allergy. Something you could try is to keep a food diary and see if there is any pattern that develops showing she has these episodes after exposure to ‘xxx’ or ‘yyy’. It could be an ingredient that is an additive rather than a main ingredient, so it is useful to keep really detailed records, including list of ingredients of processed foods, so you can identify a possible culprit accurately.

Also, remember that it is normal even for non-diabetics for blood glucose to rise immediately after eating so testing to see what level she reaches may be of limited use. 11.5 is a little above the normal high for non-diabetics so she could be showing early symptoms of type 1. The best thing to do is to check and see how quickly her blood glucose levels return to normal range after a meal, which is normally around 2 hours, although if there are high levels of fats or proteins in the meal that time frame can be extended.

So, good luck - and I suspect that while she could be showing signs of early type 1 diabetes, she may have another digestive system problem going on and I would definitely check into celiac disease and gluten intolerance or a food allergy.

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Hi there.
Thank you so much for your kind reply. Her test results came back, all within normal range apart from high nutrophils and white blood cells.
Celiac screen was negative too.
Our doctors here in NZ have very little understanding of type 1 in the early stages so it’s all being written off as “viral” even though it’s happening so often.
Back to the drawing board I guess and will have to just wait till next time she’s unwell and try again. :sob:

hmm. High neutrophils and high while blood cells generally indicate the body is trying to fight something off. I wonder if there could be a food allergy involved. What you can do is keep a food diary and then see if the symptoms are triggered after eating certain foods. You could still try a gluten free diet and see if that helps. Non-celiac gluten intolerance doesn’t show up in a blood test although there are stool tests that can measure the number of anti-gliaden antibodies for a positive diagnosis - that is how my Doctor diagnosed me. My celiac blood tests also came back negative but removing wheat, rye and barley from my diet made an incredible difference in my digestive health and symptoms. It is worth giving it a try especially since the doctors don’t have anything else to suggest at this time. The other thing to remember is the food allergy could be a bit ‘cumulative’ - a larger amount of a specific item or a cumulative amount over a few days may be the trigger. Anyway, a food diary matched to symptoms may help. Good luck. I know it must be so worrisome not to have some sort of definite answer.

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