Dialysis-associated hyperglycemia: manifestations and treatment

Quantifying the Deficits of Body Water and Monovalent Cations in Hyperglycemic Emergencies

Background/Objectives: Hyperglycemic emergencies cause significant losses of body water, sodium, and potassium. This report presents a method for computing the actual losses of water and monovalent cations in these emergencies. Methods: We developed formulas for computing the losses of water and monovalent cations as a function of the presenting serum sodium and glucose levels, the sum of the concentrations of sodium plus potassium in the lost fluids, and body water at the time of hyperglycemia presentation as measured by bioimpedance or in the initial euglycemic state as estimated by anthropometric formulas. The formulas for computing the losses from hyperglycemia were tested in examples of hyperglycemic episodes. Results: The formulas were tested in two patient groups, those with or without known weight loss during the development of hyperglycemia. In the first group, these formulas were applied to estimate the losses of body water and monovalent cations in (a) a previously published case of a boy with diabetic ketoacidosis and known weight loss who, during treatment not addressing his water deficit, developed severe hypernatremia and (b) a comparison of water loss computed by this new method with the reported average fluid gained during treatment of the hyperglycemic hyperosmolar state in a published study. In the second group, the formulas were applied in hypothetical subjects with varying levels of initial body water, serum sodium, and glucose at the time of hyperglycemia and sums of sodium and potassium concentrations in the lost fluids. Conclusions: Losses of body water and monovalent cations, which determine the severity of dehydration and hypovolemia, vary significantly between patients with hyperglycemic emergencies presenting with the same serum glucose and sodium concentrations. These losses can be calculated using estimated or measured body water values. Prospective studies are needed to test this proof-of-concept report.

Hypernatremia in Hyperglycemia: Clinical Features and Relationship to Fractional Changes in Body Water and Monovalent Cations during Its Development

In hyperglycemia, the serum sodium concentration ([Na]S) receives influences from (a) the fluid exit from the intracellular compartment and thirst, which cause [Na]S decreases; (b) osmotic diuresis with sums of the urinary sodium plus potassium concentration lower than the baseline euglycemic [Na]S, which results in a [Na]S increase; and (c), in some cases, gains or losses of fluid, sodium, and potassium through the gastrointestinal tract, the respiratory tract, and the skin. Hyperglycemic patients with hypernatremia have large deficits of body water and usually hypovolemia and develop severe clinical manifestations and significant mortality. To assist with the correction of both the severe dehydration and the hypovolemia, we developed formulas computing the fractional losses of the body water and monovalent cations in hyperglycemia. The formulas estimate varying losses between patients with the same serum glucose concentration ([Glu]S) and [Na]S but with different sums of monovalent cation concentrations in the lost fluids. Among subjects with the same [Glu]S and [Na]S, those with higher monovalent cation concentrations in the fluids lost have higher fractional losses of body water. The sum of the monovalent cation concentrations in the lost fluids should be considered when computing the volume and composition of the fluid replacement for hyperglycemic syndromes.

Efficacy of polyethylene glycol loxenatide for type 2 diabetes mellitus patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Objective: Some studies have proved that polyethylene glycol loxenatide (PEG-Loxe) has significant effects on controlling blood glucose and body weight in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), but there is still some controversy over the improvement of blood lipid profiles (BLP) and blood pressure (BP), and more evidences are needed to verify such effects. Therefore, this study was conducted to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the efficacy of PEG-Loxe in improving blood glucose (BG), BLP, BP, body mass index (BMI), and body weight (BW) in patients with T2DM for clinical reference. Methods: Randomized controlled trials (RCT) in which PEG-Loxe was applied to treat T2DM were retrieved by searching PubMed, Cochrane Library, Embase, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, China Scientific Journal, Wanfang Data, and SinoMed databases. Outcome measures included BG, BLP, BP, BMI, and BW. RevMan 5.3 software was used to perform data analysis. Results: Eighteen trials were identified involving 2,166 patients. In experimental group 1,260 patients received PEG-Loxe alone or with other hypoglycemic agents, while in control group 906 patients received placebo or other hypoglycemic agents. In the overall analysis, PEG-Loxe significantly reduced the levels of glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c), fasting plasma glucose (FPG), 2-h postprandial blood glucose (2-h PBG), BMI, and BW compared with control group. However, it had no obvious effect on total cholesterol (TC), triglycerides (TG), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), systolic blood pressure (SBP), and diastolic blood pressure (DBP). Conclusion: PEG-Loxe has better hypoglycemic effects compared with placebo in patients with T2DM, but could not significantly improved TG, LDL-C, HDL-C, SBP, and DBP. And the combination of conventional hypoglycemic drugs (CHD) and PEG-Loxe could more effectively improve the levels of HbA1c, FPG, 2-h PBG, TC, TG, BMI, and BW compared with CHD in T2DM patients. Systematic Review Registration: www.inplasy.com, identifier INPLASY202350106.

Automatic severity grade classification of diabetic retinopathy using deformable ladder Bi attention U-net and deep adaptive CNN

Long-term exposure to diabetes mellitus leads to the formation of diabetic retinopathy (DR), which can cause vision loss in working-age adults. Early stage diagnosis of DR is highly essential for preventing vision loss and preserving vision in people with diabetes. The motivation behind the severity grade classification of DR is to develop an automated system that can assist ophthalmologists and healthcare professionals in the diagnosis and management of DR. However, existing methods suffer from variability in image quality, similar structures of the normal and lesion regions, high dimensional features, variability in disease manifestations, small datasets, high training loss, model complexity, and overfitting, which leads to high misclassification errors in the severity grading system. Hence, there is a need to develop an automated system using improved deep learning techniques to provide a reliable and consistent grading of DR severity with high classification accuracy using fundus images. To solve these issues, we proposes a Deformable Ladder Bi attention U-shaped encoder-decoder network and Deep Adaptive Convolutional Neural Network (DLBUnet-DACNN) for accurate severity classification of DR. The DLBUnet performs lesion segmentation that can be divided into three parts: the encoder, the central processing module and the decoder. In the encoder part, deformable convolution is used instead of convolution to learn different shapes of the lesion by understanding the offset location. Afterwards, Ladder Atrous Spatial Pyramidal Pooling (LASPP) using variable dilation rates is introduced in the central processing module. LASPP enhance the tiny lesion features and variable dilation rates avoid gridding effects and can learn better global context information. Then the decoder part uses a bi-attention layer contains spatial and channel attention, which can learn contour and edges of the lesion accurately. Finally, the severity of DR is classified using a DACNN by extracting the discriminative features from the segmentation results. Experiments are conducted on the Messidor-2, Kaggle, and Messidor datasets. Our proposed method DLBUnet-DACNN achieves better results in terms of accuracy of 98.2, recall of 0.987, kappa coefficient of 0.993, precision of 0.98, F1-score of 0.981, Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.93 and Classification Success Index (CSI) of 0.96 when compared to existing methods.

Diabetic ketoacidosis

Diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) is a form of a hyperglycemic emergency mainly characterized by the triad of hyperglycemia, ketosis, and anion gap metabolic acidosis. DKA may be the initial presentation in approximately 25-40 % of patients with type 1 diabetes. It may also occur in at least 34% of patients with type 2 diabetes. DKA has economic as well as medical implications. This review aims to explore and discuss diabetic ketoacidosis, its pathophysiology, clinical presentation, diagnosis, and management, including nuances in special populations such as pediatrics, obstetrics, and patients with chronic kidney disease.

Assessment of Hyperglycemia, Hypoglycemia and Inter-Day Glucose Variability Using Continuous Glucose Monitoring among Diabetic Patients on Chronic Hemodialysis

Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) facilitates the assessment of short-term glucose variability and identification of acute excursions of hyper- and hypo-glycemia. Among 37 diabetic hemodialysis patients who underwent 7-day CGM with the iPRO2 device (Medtronic Diabetes, Northridge, CA, USA), we explored the accuracy of glycated albumin (GA) and hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) in assessing glycemic control, using CGM-derived metrics as the reference standard. In receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, the area under the curve (AUC) in diagnosing a time in the target glucose range of 70–180 mg/dL (TIR^70–180) in <50% of readings was higher for GA (AUC: 0.878; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.728–0.962) as compared to HbA1c (AUC: 0.682; 95% CI: 0.508–0.825) (p < 0.01). The accuracy of GA (AUC: 0.939; 95% CI: 0.808–0.991) in detecting a time above the target glucose range > 250 mg/dL (TAR^>250) in >10% of readings did not differ from that of HbA1c (AUC: 0.854; 95% CI: 0.699–0.948) (p = 0.16). GA (AUC: 0.712; 95% CI: 0.539–0.848) and HbA1c (AUC: 0.740; 95% CI: 0.570–0.870) had a similarly lower efficiency in detecting a time below target glucose range < 70 mg/dL (TBR^<70) in >1% of readings (p = 0.71). Although the mean glucose levels were similar, the coefficient of variation of glucose recordings (39.2 ± 17.3% vs. 32.0 ± 7.8%, p < 0.001) and TBR^<70 (median (range): 5.6% (0, 25.8) vs. 2.8% (0, 17.9)) were higher during the dialysis-on than during the dialysis-off day. In conclusion, the present study shows that among diabetic hemodialysis patients, GA had higher accuracy than HbA1c in detecting a 7-day CGM-derived TIR^70–180 < 50%. However, both biomarkers provided an imprecise reflection of acute excursions of hypoglycemia and inter-day glucose variability.

Biochemical Parameters of Diabetes Ketoacidosis in Patients with End-stage Kidney Disease and Preserved Renal Function

INTRODUCTION

Differences in biochemical parameters of diabetic ketoacidosis in patients with end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) has not been established. Accordingly, we assessed the relationship between degree of metabolic acidosis and ß-hydroxybutyrate in patients with ESKD (eGFR < 15 mL/min/1.73 m2), moderate renal failure (eGFR 15-60), or preserved renal function (eGFR > 60).

METHODS

This observational study included adults (18-80 years) with diabetes ketoacidosis (DKA), admitted to Emory University Hospitals between January 1, 2006 to December 31, 2016. DKA and renal stages were confirmed on admission laboratory values.

RESULTS

Admission bicarbonate levels (13.9 ± 5 vs 13.4 ± 5.3 vs 13.8 ± 4.2 mmol/L, P = 0.7), and pH levels (7.2 ± 0.3 vs 7.2 ± 0.2 vs 7.2 ± 0.2, P = 0.8) were similar among groups. Patients with ESKD had lower mean ß-hydroxybutyrate level (4.3 ± 3.3 vs 5.6 ± 2.9 vs 5.9 ± 2.5 mmol/L, P = 0.01), but higher admission glucose (852 ± 340.4 vs 714.6 ± 253.3 mg/dL vs 518 ± 185.7 mg/dL, P < 0.01), anion gap (23.4 ± 7.6 vs 23 ± 6.9 vs 19.5 ± 4.7 mmol/L, P < 0.01), and osmolality (306 ± 20.6 vs 303.5 ± vs 293.1 ± 3.1mOsm/kg, P < 0.01) compared with patients with moderate renal failure and preserved renal function, respectively. The sensitivity of ß-hydroxybutyrate > 3 mmol/L for diagnosing DKA by bicarbonate level < 15 and <18 mmol/L was 86.9% and 72% in ESKD, 89.3% and 83.7% in moderate renal failure, and 96.2% and 88.3% in preserved renal function. In patients with ESKD, the corresponding ß-hydroxybutyrate with bicarbonate levels < 10, 10-15, <18 mmol/L were 5.5, 3.9, 3.0 mmol/L, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

Significant metabolic differences were found among DKA patients with different levels of renal function. In patients with ESKD, a ß-hydroxybutyrate level > 3 mmol/L may assist with confirmation of DKA diagnosis.

The Corrected Serum Sodium Concentration in Hyperglycemic Crises: Computation and Clinical Applications

In hyperglycemia, hypertonicity results from solute (glucose) gain and loss of water in excess of sodium plus potassium through osmotic diuresis. Patients with stage 5 chronic kidney disease (CKD) and hyperglycemia have minimal or no osmotic diuresis; patients with preserved renal function and diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) or hyperosmolar hyperglycemic state (HHS) have often large osmotic diuresis. Hypertonicity from glucose gain is reversed with normalization of serum glucose ([Glu]); hypertonicity due to osmotic diuresis requires infusion of hypotonic solutions. Prediction of the serum sodium after [Glu] normalization (the corrected [Na]) estimates the part of hypertonicity caused by osmotic diuresis. Theoretical methods calculating the corrected [Na] and clinical reports allowing its calculation were reviewed. Corrected [Na] was computed separately in reports of DKA, HHS and hyperglycemia in CKD stage 5. The theoretical prediction of [Na] increase by 1.6 mmol/L per 5.6 mmol/L decrease in [Glu] in most clinical settings, except in extreme hyperglycemia or profound hypervolemia, was supported by studies of hyperglycemia in CKD stage 5 treated only with insulin. Mean corrected [Na] was 139.0 mmol/L in 772 hyperglycemic episodes in CKD stage 5 patients. In patients with preserved renal function, mean corrected [Na] was within the eunatremic range (141.1 mmol/L) in 7,812 DKA cases, and in the range of severe hypernatremia (160.8 mmol/L) in 755 cases of HHS. However, in DKA corrected [Na] was in the hypernatremic range in several reports and rose during treatment with adverse neurological consequences in other reports. The corrected [Na], computed as [Na] increase by 1.6 mmol/L per 5.6 mmol/L decrease in [Glu], provides a reasonable estimate of the degree of hypertonicity due to losses of hypotonic fluids through osmotic diuresis at presentation of DKH or HHS and should guide the tonicity of replacement solutions. However, the corrected [Na] may change during treatment because of ongoing fluid losses and should be monitored during treatment.

Management of extracellular volume in patients with end-stage kidney disease and severe hyperglycemia

This commentary addresses volume replacement in hyperglycemic crises in patients with end-stage kidney disease (ESKD). The management of volume issues in this group of patients should not be based on guidelines for management of hyperglycemic crises, but should be individualized and based on directed patient medical history, physical examination, and imaging of the heart and lungs. A scheme for combining information from these three sources is provided.

Eating during the Hemodialysis Session: A Practice Improving Nutritional Status or a Risk Factor for Intradialytic Hypotension and Reduced Dialysis Adequacy?

Historically, eating during the hemodialysis treatment has been associated with increased risk for adverse intradialytic symptoms and events, risks that have resulted in the implementation of restrictive in-center nutrition policies. Recent studies, however, have recorded a shift in clinical practice with a higher proportion of physicians following the view that administration of intradialytic meals and supplements represents a simple and effective approach to enhance caloric intake and improve nutritional status among patients on hemodialysis. This shift towards less restrictive in-center nutrition practices is mainly supported by evidence from observational studies associating intradialytic nutritional supplementation with improvements in protein-energy wasting, inflammatory state, and health-related quality of life. In sharp contrast, earlier and recent interventional studies have documented that feeding during the hemodialysis treatment provokes a rapid postprandial decline in blood pressure and raises the incidence of symptomatic intradialytic hypotension. Furthermore, other studies have shown that postprandial redistribution in intravascular volume and enhanced blood supply to the gastrointestinal circulation may interfere with the adequacy of the delivered hemodialysis. Those who defend the position that intradialytic nutritional support is beneficial do not dispute the physiology of postprandial hemodynamic response, but they argue against its clinical significance. In this article, we provide an overview of studies that explored the effect of eating during the hemodialysis treatment on intradialytic hemodynamic stability and adequacy of the delivered hemodialysis. We reason that these risks have important clinical implications that are not counteracted by anticipated benefits of this strategy on caloric intake and nutritional status.