Does taking additional insulin correct a high blood sugar level?

Does taking additional insulin correct a high blood sugar level?

Anne Peters, MD, FACP, CDE (Professor and Director of Clinical Diabetes Programs, USC Keck School of Medicine) gives expert video advice on: Does taking additional insulin correct a high blood sugar level?; Why is my blood pressure important if I have diabetes?; What are the most common causes of death for people with diabetes? and more...

Giving insulin is an incredible art because you're trying to be a pancreas; you're trying to be an internal organ and you're giving it externally. So, if your blood sugar is three hundred, which is way too high as you're supposed to be a hundred (a hundred's normal) and you give a dose of, say, four units of insulin (what we call a correction) to bring it down to a hundred, and you check it an hour later and it's still high, what do you do? Well, what you don't want to do at that moment is give more insulin because we call that "insulin stacking". If you give insulin too soon after the last dose, the insulin can build up in your body and cause a low blood sugar reaction. So, we have people wait for several hours in between doses so that then there's not that risk of a low blood sugar. One of the things that a pump, an insulin pump does, is it actually calculates what we call "insulin on board". So, say you wait for two hours, you check again and you're still high, it will calculate how much of the last dose is still in your body and let you give a little bit more so you come to the right balance. Technology helps us answer that question better, but the rule of thumb is don't give insulin more often than every three to four hours so you don't stack the insulin and cause a low blood sugar reaction.