The need for continued self-monitoring of blood glucose (SMBG) testing remains important for all intermittently scanned continuous glucose monitoring (isCGM) system users and may affect overall cost-effectiveness of isCGM, according to a study published in Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics. With hypoglycemia-prone patients with type 1 diabetes who use isCGM systems shown in previous research to spend approximately 5 hours per day in states during which SMBG is indicated, investigators estimated the need for SMBG testing by retrospectively analyzing isCGM data from a cohort of real-world isCGM users. Participants spend a mean of 3.18 hours per day in an SMBG-indicated state, with a mean of 3.86 transitions to an SMBG indicated state per day. The median frequency of clinically important hypoglycemia episodes per week was 1.5, among which only 50% were associated with a scan during the episode and the average duration was 75.2 minutes per episode. “Impaired awareness of hypoglycaemia and incidence of asymptomatic hypoglycaemia may be underreported [among] real-life isCGM users in clinical practice,” write the study authors.
