preview

Why Do Low Blood Glucose Levels

Decent Essays

Scenario: Low blood glucose levels
A person is doing the 40-hour famine. This is when the person cannot eat for 48 hours to raise money for World Vision. When a person does not eat for 48 hours they are not ingesting any glucose from food so there will be a deficiency of blood glucose levels. Blood glucose levels are monitored by the islets of Langerhans. Low blood glucose levels are sensed by the alpha cells in the islets so during the 40-hour famine when blood sugars fall below 5mM, alpha cells sense this and release the polypeptide hormone glucagon. Glucagon raises blood glucose levels in a way that is antagonistic to insulin. Its effect is to increase blood glucose levels and its effect is most powerful when insulin levels in the blood …show more content…

It circulates in the bloodstream and binds only to specific receptors on the surface of liver cells. This binding stimulates a change in the shape of the receptor which activates an enzyme called glycogen phosphorylase which begins the breakdown of glycogen polymers back into glucose. It also opens glucose channels to allow the freshly broken down glucose to flow out of the cell.

Glucose
Glucose cannot get inside a cell unless specific proteins called ‘glucose transporters’ are in the membrane. These are there to provide a channel for the glucose to move through. They do not use energy so will only transport glucose from areas of high blood glucose concentration to areas of low blood glucose concentration. So if a cell is using glucose and levels in the cell drop, glucose will move from the bloodstream on the outside of the cell to inside the cell to boost those glucose levels until an equilibrium is reached.
When liver cells are stimulated by glucagon to produce glucose from glycogen there will be lots of glucose on the inside of the cells so glucose will flow from the inside of the cell to the outside. In the brain and liver there are always glucose transporters in the plasma membrane. This is because if glucose is constantly being used by the brain and nerve cells for energy, there will always be low glucose levels in the cell so glucose will always be flowing into the …show more content…

Type 1 or ‘early onset diabetes’ is an auto immune disease in which the immune system attacks and destroys the body’s own beta cells.
In type 1 diabetes the immune system attacks and destroys the insulin producing beta cells in the islets of Langerhans. The body is believed to do this because of some unfortunate genetic coding.
All people have particular HLA (human leukocyte antigen) complexes, but scientists have found that diabetes is likely to develop in people who have a specific HLA complex. The purpose of this complex is to trigger an immune response in the body. When the body gets an infection the immune system produces antibodies to fight it. In charge of making these antibodies are T cells. If the infection has similar antigens (something recognized by the immune system as a threat) as beta cells, the T cells can turn against the beta cells and begin destroying them. This destruction happens over several years, though disease symptoms appear quite quickly.
Without beta cells obviously the body cannot produce insulin in response to high blood glucose, causing type 1 diabetics to have abnormally high blood sugar

Get Access