Laboratory Diagnosis of Diabetes

Abstract

IT IS QUITE possible that means will soon be developed for identifying a specific defect in persons with genetically determined diabetes. But for the present the diagnosis still requires evidence of disturbed glucose tolerance. It has now been more than half a century since Jacobsen1(1913) reported on the use of a glucose-loading test as a means of measuring carbohydrate tolerance. Other pioneers in this field included Hopkins,2and Hamman and Hirschman.3These early workers observed that in contrast to normal persons those with diabetes exhibited blood sugar levels, after an oral glucose load, which were usually over 200 mg/100 ml at some time during the first hour and which failed to return to fasting levels by the third hour. Hamman and Hirschman3concluded in 1917 that: "In normal persons after ingestion of 100 gm of glucose, the blood sugar rises promptly to a level not