Effect of Glucose Dose Upon Intravenous Glucose Tolerance in Health and in Diabetes

Abstract

The effect of variations in glucose dose from 0.25 to 3.0 g/kg0.7 upon the results of the rapid intravenous glucose tolerance test has been studied in healthy subjects, and in mildly and severely diabetic subjects. In healthy subjects the blood glucose decay constant increased progressively as the glucose dose increased. In mildly diabetic subjects there was only a slight tendency for the decay constant to increase with progressive glucose loading. The severely diabetic subjects had low decay constants at all glucose dose levels. The dose-response relationships were such that, when the amount of glucose given approximated that usually used in the rapid intravenous glucose test (20–30 g), there was considerable overlap between the results from healthy and mildly diabetic subjects, but when greater amounts of glucose were given the results from the 2 groups became distinctly separated. The data therefore suggest that, when an adequate quantity of glucose is given, the rapid intravenous glucose tolerance test is a highly sensitive indicator of abnormal carbohydrate metabolism.