I started to try Afrezza yesterday and it indeed is extremely fast-acting.
I have tried Fiasp, Humalog, Novalog in combination with Lantus and/or Toujeo. I have an unusual metabolism in that any of the injected insulins take an exceptionally long time (2 hours or more after injection) to begin to lower my blood sugar. My endocrinologist thought that I was crazy and that this was totally impossible when using Humalog, Novalog, or even Fiasp, but my Dexcom doesn’t lie. Luckily, I’ve run into several people on this Forum who have the same problem with their Type I that I do… exceptionally long time between injection and the lowering of blood sugar.
Afrezza, after three days of use seems to actually work within 15 minutes or so. However, it remains in my system for only a very short time. If I take 20 units (one 12 unit and one 8 unit), I can now eat 15 to 20 minutes after the inhalation and maintain a blood sugar level of below 135. With Fiasp, if I tried to eat the same meal (let’s say a Burger King Whopper) 20 minutes after injection, my blood sugar would be up at 300 within 20 minutes after eating the junk. Then, I’d experience hypoglycemia (50) 2 hours later…
Afrezza clears my system within 1 hour after inhalation. Thus, it acts fast, and clears fast. If I eat a slowly-digested meal with only protein and comple carbs, Afrezza clears before the food is completely digested and my blood sugar goes up into the high 100’s (170 to 220 or so). If I eat crap carbs (like that Whopper), then the Afrezza works just fine to keep my blood sugar between 100 and 140.
We’ll see how fast Afrezza keeps working over the next month or so…
I’m hoping that the company that makes Afrezza gets it only my ObamaCare’s approved drug list so I can continue using it.
I use Afrezza for stubborn corrections or for very high carb meals, like Pizza, and it’s fantastic. In fact, early this AM my blood sugar went up because of a bad infusion site. I had already been up for more than an hour trying to get my BG down using Fiasp blouses, but it wasn’t working. It was 4AM and I didn’t want to deal with changing my infusion site. Instead I just used Afrezza to bring my BG down and dealt with the infusion site after I woke up. I thought I’d share the screen shot from my G6 app to show three things -
Affrezza works very quickly. As @Fred_E suggests, it was out of my system in about an hour.
It stops ‘on a dime’ - blood sugar stops dropping almost immediately. No tail to deal with. You can see the almost immediate stop at 68.
You can get hypoglycemia with Afrezza and you have to watch it because blood sugar is dropping so quickly. In this case I used a 4u cartridge (smallest available commercially) and it was too much for this correction.
I am also a big fan. And yes I use it mostly for stubborn highs. The two arrow down can be pretty scary the first time but it levels out pretty quickly and is gone quickly. I know many who use it for meals and they do report having to use a second cartridge a couple hours later because it wears off before some meals are out of their system.
But it is something I love having available. I got my first prescription with no problems but did get a letter from the insurance company stating they would have to review if it was necessary. So while the doctor’s office and insurance fight it out, I got a sample box from my endo!
That might be something people should start asking, a sample to give it a try.
You have to suck in the entire cartridge… So if you choose to use a 4 unit cartridge, you’ll get 4 units – you have no choice. Same for 8 and 12 unit cartridges, you can’t partial dose unless you have very, very, VERY good breath control… Also, when you take a partially used cartridge out of the inhaler device, you’d spill a lot of the insulin…
You can split cartridges. I make 1, 2, or whatever I want cartridges. It’s an “eyeball” estimate but works well for me. I ditched the pump awhile ago and use tresiba and afrezza only. Ate a burger and fries recently and got up to 120 mg/dL glucose…
