Can you test for hypoglycemia?

Question

can a person be tested for hypoglycemia after death and if so what kind of information could be attained?

Answer 1

You could do it, but I'm not sure how much use the results would be.  Testing for hypoglycemia even in a living person is not all that simple--you can't just test the blood once and say "You have hypoglycemia!" because all you know is that they have low blood sugar at that particular moment in time--you don't know if it happens all the time.  To learn whether or not they have hypoglycemia as a condition, you have to see how their blood sugar rises and falls over the course of the day and before and after they eat, which of course you can't do with a corpse.

So the most information you could learn was whether or not the person had had low blood sugar at the time that they died, and even that might be misleading--if, say, the person died during a seizure, a lot of their blood glucose would have been used up during the convulsions, and once they're dead their liver can't release any more.

Also--and this is purely speculation--I suspect that it would also depend on how long after death you took the measurement, because I would imagine that bacteria in the body would go to work on any loose sugar they found pretty rapidly, and once it was used up it wouldn't be replenished any more.

Answer 2

Yes, an autopsy could verify hypoglycemia. To my knowledge, the only information that could be obtained from an autopsy is that a person had hypoglycemia.