Biography
Biography: Mario Ciampolini
Abstract
Background: Hunger has often components that are conditioned by time, social behavior and sight of food. Blood glucose concentration (BG) is a biomarker of current energy availability and of hunger.
Objectives: Investigating whether energy per meal reduction may allow BG to fall to low levels, when feeding behavior is (mostly) unconditioned and can be recognized.
Methods: Subjects of the experimental group (trained; n = 80) were trained to ignore meal times and to pay attention to their earliest sensations of hunger or discomfort, so to measure glucose (blood glucose,BG) with a glucometer for two weeks. The control group was untrained; n = 78). After 7-week, all subjects were asked to estimate their preprandial BG that was simultaneously measured through a glucose autoanalyzer.
Results: Estimated and measured glycemic values were found to be linearly correlated in the trained group (r = 0.82; p = 0.0001) but not in the control (untrained) group (r = 0.10; p = 0.40). Fewer subjects in the trained group were hungrier than those in the control group (p = 0.001). The 18 hungry subjects of the trained group had significantly lower glucose levels (80.1 ± 6.3 mg/dL) than the 42 hungry control subjects (89.2 ± 10.2 mg/dL; p = 0.01). The estimation error of the entire trained group (4.7 ± 3.6%) was significantly lower than that of the control subjects (17.1 ± 11.5%; p = 0.0001).
Conclusion: Patients could be trained to accurately estimate their blood glucose and to recognize their sensations of initial hunger at low glucose concentrations.