ESPE Abstracts

Objective: Our goal was to identify the etiological distribution of our hypoglycemia-diagnosed patients, who presented to pediatric clinics with a variety of symptoms.

Materials and Methods: We conducted the study by retrospectively examining recoded data from patients who applied to pediatric emergency services, pediatric outpatient clinics, pediatric metabolism, and endocrinology outpatient clinics between 2015 and 2021. The patients were cases of proven hypoglycemia between the ages of 1 month and 18 years, the patients had proven hypoglycemia.

Results: The mean age of a total of 170 patients with documented hypoglycemia was 4.10 (±SD 3.81). Of the patients, 83 (48.8%) were female and 87 (51.2%) were male. We divided the patients into 4 age groups: 1 month–1 year, 1–5 years, 5–10 years, and 10–18 years. More than half of the cases (54.7%) were between 1 and 5 years of age. The study revealed that the cause of hypoglycemia was unknown in 61 (35.9%) patients. Considering all patients, the most common cause was idiopathic ketotic hypoglycemia, with 34.7% (n = 59). We observed that 83 (48.8%) of all patients had metabolic causes of hypoglycemia, 17 (10%) had endocrinological causes, and 9 (5.3%) had hypoglycemia due to other causes.

Conclusion: The literature indicates that idiopathic ketotic hypoglycemia, typically occurring between 18 months and 6 years of age, is the most common cause of hypoglycemia in childhood. The fact that ketotic hypoglycemia was the most common cause in our study (48.8%), and that the majority of the patients (54.7%) were between the ages of 1 and 5 years supports this information. Simultaneously, it was noteworthy that 35.9% of the patients remained undiagnosed.