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http://padailypost.com/2018/04/09/doctor-offers-hypothesis-about-how-google-engineer-died/

Why Chuchu Ma spoke about “going into the water” on a disoriented 911 call the day before her naked body was found in a drainage ditch of the San Francisco Bay remains a mystery to medical examiners, but one Palo Alto endocrinologist has offered a compelling hypothesis.

Dr. Elizabeth Fraze suggested that, considering the 23-year-old Google engineer’s history of pancreatitis and the fact that she was monitoring her blood sugar with a medical device, she may have experienced the cognitive impairment and behavioral changes that can accompany the low blood sugar state suffered by diabetics.

“Diabetics drive their cars into trees and wipe out buses of nuns all the time,” Fraze said. “My diabetic patients carry a card that says, ‘If I’m acting oddly, I’m diabetic. Please look into my blood sugar.’”

...

Fraze suggested that Ma could have been hypoglycemic rather than psychotic or suicidal, but said that her hypothesis didn’t contradict O’Hara’s conclusion that she had likely entered the water in a confused state and drowned.

“Hypoglycemia starves the brain,” Fraze said. “There are medical reasons that could explain her confusing actions.”

Fraze has practiced endocrinology for 37 years and is an adjunct professor at Stanford, but emphasized that her background is not in forensics and her knowledge of Ma’s death is limited to what she read in the Post and Ma’s autopsy report.

That report shows that Ma had slightly high blood sugar when she was autopsied, which Fraze said could indicate the Somogyi effect, a spike in blood sugar in response to hypoglycemia.

Thanks for posting that -- I had not seen that article in the PA Daily Post. That hypothesis makes a lot of sense. You'd have thought that would have been mentioned in the coroner's report and perhaps been suggested as a root cause of death. I didn't realize that pancreatitis could cause the same cognitive impairment and behavioral changes that can accompany the low blood sugar state suffered by diabetics.

Cognitive Dysfunction and Diabetes Mellitus, April 2008.

"The deleterious effects of diabetes mellitus on the retinal, renal, cardiovascular, and peripheral nervous systems are widely acknowledged. Less attention has been given to the effect of diabetes on cognitive function. Both type 1 and type 2 diabetes mellitus have been associated with reduced performance on numerous domains of cognitive function. The exact pathophysiology of cognitive dysfunction in diabetes is not completely understood, but it is likely that hyperglycemia, vascular disease, hypoglycemia, and insulin resistance play significant roles."