What can I say? I have had a love affair with research on hypoglycemia. I suppose ever since my colleague and I began the quest of rewriting the Canadian Pediatric Society statement The screening and management of newborns at risk for low blood glucose it has become an interest. Embedded in the statement is commentary on the use of glucose gels for management of neonatal hypoglycemia and based on the sugar babies trial that found treatment of hypoglycemia with dextrose gel reduced admission for hypoglycemia and improved rates of breastfeeding after discharge I have been a proponent. A new approach has arisen in a large study in neonates that warrants some discussion. It tackles hypoglycemia from a preventative approach rather than as a treatment per se and is presented below.

The hPOD Study

The same group from Auckland led by Jane Harding published a preventative trial in January entitled Evaluation of oral dextrose gel for prevention of neonatal hypoglycemia (hPOD): Amulticenter, double-blind randomized
controlled trial.
The study approached the problem of hypoglycemia by looking at whether provision of dextrose gel at 1 hour of age along with a breastfeed could reduce admission to NICU. The targeted population were babies with risk factors for hypoglcyemia such as maternal diabetes, late preterms and SGA or LGA infants. Remarkably this multicentre study managed to randomize 2149 infants into dextrose (1078) and placebo 1071) arms which for a neonatal study is pretty big! Blood glucose levels were analyzed on all at risk infants at 2 hours of age and were then followed up every 2-4 hours for the first 12 hours of age and until there were 3 consecutive measurements greater than or equal to 2.6 mmol/L. Given the size of the study it should come as no surprise that the two groups were similar in terms of baseline characteristics. The most common risk factor for hypoglycemia in each group was maternal diabetes at 81% in each group.

In the end the only thing that was different between the two groups was a diagnosis of hypoglycemia with about a 5% reduction in the outcome. Admission to NICU was no different whether it was for any reason or hypoglycemia alone. Treatment with IV therapy was also no different between groups and in addition breastfeeding rates were exceptionally high at discharge at about 96% for both groups. So the conclusion here is that prophylactic glucose gel doesn’t matter much but I have a few thoughts despite this being a VERY large trial and the authors really doing a good job of answering an important question.

My Thoughts on the Outcomes

  1. The study demonstrates that one dose of glucose gel does not affect admission for any reason or for hypoglycemia. I can’t help but wonder if allowing the dextrose gel group to receive one or two more doses could have changed that outcome.
  2. No difference in admission is not surprising since there are many reasons that a baby could be admitted with those underlying risk factors. Low birth weight, TTN, RDS etc would be some reasons and I wouldn’t think would be any different. It might have been better to power the study for admission for hypoglycemia as that to me is the only reason for admission that could be impacted by such prophylaxis.
  3. When your breastfeeding rate in the placebo arm is at 95.9% there really isn’t much room for improvement so not sure a lack of improvement with dextrose gels can really be called here. There really wasn’t anywhere to go but down and previous work suggested that rates can go up. As the saying goes, can you apply the results of the study to my population. I can only wonder what would have happened if the authors were to replicate this study in a population with breastfeeding rates of 80%.
  4. Is the outcome of reduced hypoglycemia a good enough outcome alone to adopt prophylactic dextrose gel? I don’t think so as there was no difference in groups between recurrent or severe hypoglycemia which is what likely matters most to neurodevelopmental outcome. Curiously the mean initial blood glucose was 2.97 and 3.16 in the placebo and glucose gel arms respectively so I am not sure how hypoglycemic this population really was. Yes there were about 40% in each arm that were hypoglycemic but only 10% were severe and almost 90% never had another episode. It’s possible that just by chance these children were on a very mild spectrum and therefore prophylaxis had little effect since they really were only going to have transient hypoglycemia.

In spite of my comments above I believe the authors did a fine job trying to answer an important question which to be honest others have wondered about before. For now I won’t be recommending this in my own institution but I do wonder what project will come next from this group that keeps on producing great work in the area of neonatal hypoglycemia.