Glucose Modelling

Mathematical models have been widely used to describe the glucose system with the aim of assessing glucose kinetics, both in steady state and nonsteady state, and to quantify the interaction between glucose and hormones, in particular, insulin. Given that glucose concentration is usually measured in the blood circulation, glucose modelling is facilitated if the system is perturbed intravenously (IV), for example, by administering a glucose bolus (as it happens during the intravenous glucose tolerance test). Thus, the data employed to model the glucose system traditionally come from IV perturbations. In the last decades, building on the IV glucose models, new models have been proposed to interpret and simulate data deriving from an oral glucose perturbation, such as the meal tolerance test (MTT) and the oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT).In this chapter, we focus our attention on models describing the glucose system during MTT and OGTT. After a brief introduction on the motivations that led the researchers to move to oral tests, we first present the oral glucose minimal (parsimonious) models used to measure specific metabolic functions and then the maximal (large-scale) models used for simulation.