Colette Morris’ forearm monitor has turned her battle with diabetes around. Data sent regularly to her phone tells her about foods and stress that cause her blood sugar levels to go out of whack.
This technology is not suitable for everyone. Four of Morris’ siblings have diabetes, and some dislike the sensors attached to their arms and the false alarms they receive when their blood sugar levels spike.
A 68-year-old man from Minneapolis said the old-fashioned finger prick test works fine for them and still maintains safe A1C blood sugar levels. “If you’re doing all this and your A1C is normal, you may not need to know all this information hourly.”
The problem is, no one really knows whether high-tech surveillance will make a difference. Continuous blood glucose monitors are exploding on the market, and Litchfield-based Best Buy sells them through partnerships with online clinics that prescribe them. However, there is little data to prove the value of investing more than $300 in transmitters and $100 per month in disposable sensors.
Enter Health Partners. The Bloomington-based health system has launched one of the nation’s first real-world clinical trials to see if the monitor produces better health outcomes than older, cheaper finger-prick blood tests. .
The direct study, which involved more than 300 Minnesotans taking insulin for diabetes, was underway earlier this year and just received funding to double its size.
The quality of blood sugar monitors is evolving, and most pairings use a quarter-sized arm sensor to send blood sugar readings to your mobile device. A key question is whether a continuous stream of blood sugar data is better at managing diabetes and preventing complications than point-in-time data obtained by manually placing a drop of blood on a test strip.
Monitoring your blood sugar levels by any means is very important. This is to help diabetics avoid having too much blood sugar (hyperglycemia) or too little (hypoglycemia). Immediate effects include car accidents if you are driving when levels spike, while long-term effects include kidney problems and other disorders.
Resolving financial issues may be important. Type 2 diabetes is 5 billion dollar problem In Minnesota, it was used to tally health care costs and lost worker productivity due to illness. More than 10% of Minnesota adults will be told by a doctor that they have diabetes in 2022, double the number 20 years ago. federal survey data.
“Using blood glucose data to change lifestyle management and improve diabetes has great implications,” said study leader and medical director of the International Diabetes Center at HealthPartners Research Institute in St. Louis Park. said one Dr. Thomas Martens. “If any of these technologies can help make that happen, that’s a big deal.”
“Financial toxicity” is a problem, say people involved. University of Michigan researchThey found that half of Americans struggle to pay for diabetes treatment.
The rising cost of insulin, a drug that raises blood sugar levels, prompted the Minnesota Legislature in 2020 to create a discount option. Their effort is named after Alec Smith, a 26-year-old Minneapolis restaurant manager who died while distributing insulin. But drug therapy is only one component of diabetes management, Martens said.
“All of this adds up to a significant financial burden,” he says.
Morris would like to know the results of the study, which was privately funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute in Washington, DC. She is a consultant on the study and is coaching Health Partners scientists on how to communicate with participants.
Morris, who has battled diabetes for 18 years, has become something of an expert on living with the disease. This forced her to give up rice, pizza, and sourdough bread, which she had previously made from scratch. But since switching to continuous monitoring, she said she’s learned more about how stress, heat and other foods affect blood sugar levels.
She has calibrated the device to avoid false readings and alarms, but you may need to do a finger stick test to be safe and react if your blood sugar levels are low.
“I have Swedish fish in almost every pocket of my coat,” she said. “It raises blood sugar levels, and I like them!”