Being a diabetic isn’t easy. Many lifestyle changes needed after someone diagnosed with diabetes. Especially changes in diet causing restriction, frustration not even mentioning about the daily fingerpicks 4-5 times a day. CGMs are detecting the blood glucose levels from the interstitial fluid without doing a fingerpick. How can CGMs help lifestyle change? Are they accurate enough?
Diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disease that causes high blood sugar. With diabetes either your body doesn’t make enough insulin or can’t effectively use the insulin it does make. Under normal circumstances the blood glucose level in the body relatively constant, generally maintained at 3.9-6.1 mmol/L before meals and 7.8-8.3mmol/L after meals. Real time CGMs are measuring the blood glucose levels from the interstitial fluid. Avoiding fingerpicks daily sounds amazing for a diabetic patent, monitor their diet how different food effect blood their glucose, which food to choose and avoid during diet? Question is that are the sensors accurate enough? Study was done among 15 healthy children (9–17 years, 11 boys) wore a GW2B and a CGMS during 24-h, and reference serum glucose was measured hourly during the day and half-hourly overnight. Compared with the reference glucose, the median absolute difference in concentrations measured by the GW2B (487 pairs) was 13 mg/dL and by the CGMS was 17 mg/dL (668 pairs), with 30% and 42% of values using the GW2B and CGMS, respectively, deviating >20 mg/dL from the reference value. The GW2B reported values <60 mg/dL in 73% of subjects, the CGMS in 60%. In none of these episodes was serum glucose truly low. Spurious high glucose concentrations were also observed with the sensors. The mean reference glucose was lowest at 5AM (89 mg/dL) and highest at 11:30PM (106 mg/dL) during the 24-h. Neither the CGMS nor GW2B is accurate enough to establish population standards of the glycemic profile of healthy children and cannot be recommended in the workup of hypoglycemia in nondiabetic youth.
Based on a study made in the USA CGMs aren’t accurate enough to detect hypoglycemia among children however to get a brief picture how different food effect glucose levels are very useful for type 1 or type 2 diabetics what makes their lifestyle change in diet easier without doing fingerpicks on daily basis.
References:
Article title: The National Center for Biotechnology Information
Website title: CGM s accuracy study
URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2248702/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2248702/
Article title:
Diabetes types
Website title:
Healthline.com
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