Many of you have used glucagon clinically. It does a bunch of things, but administration of

glucagon rapidly increases blood sugar. And because it has that property,

glucagon is used as a pharmacological treatment for diabetic patients having hypoglycemia. So don't

forget about that option.

D50 is not your only option in symptomatic hypoglycemia.

And too many rounds of D50 can be hazardous to the veins.

So you can inject glucagon or Nutella and get that sugar up.

And please see through my twisted humor, do not inject Nutella.

It's extraordinarily high in sugar and tastes awesome on crapes, but injecting it will kill you.

Glucagon, on the other hand, you can inject IV, intramuscularly, subcutaneously if you needed to.

And it's usually not the first thing we jump to. And one of the reasons

that we don't jump to it very quickly is it can induce nausean vomiting. So you often want to lay the

patient in a lateral recumbent position to protect the airway because they can wake up and just vomit and aspirate.

So usually with hypoglycemia, we want the person who's having the hypoglycemic event to eat

if they can do so safely if they're awake and alert enough.

If not, we try and give some sugar.

If not, glugogon's an option.

And then usually you want them to have some

sugar either orally or IV soon afterwards. Another effective therapy that glucagon is used

for is beta blocker overdose, where we give an IV administration of a bolus followed by an infusion.

Therefore, glucagon is not solely only about glucose metabolism.

Now, the alpha cells of the pancreas make glucagon.

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