Every now & then I wonder what would happen if one slapped a CGM onto someone with an ostensibly healthy body. Just what sort of BG curve would you see?
This is the type of the question it was probably never really worth spending too much money & effort investigating before the technology wheel turned. Now that it has, I wonder if anyone has bothered to look into this further?
Anyone seen anything online they could point to? Falling that, any “hard copy” references?
The only specific person I know of who has done this is Terry Gregg, but I don’t recall him saying anything much about it other than that he did it.
I guess part of what triggered this question is that frequently and in many different ways we tend to refer to what is “normal”. Well, now that we can actually get a better idea of what this might look like, has anyone actually done it?
My CDE tried one for a couple of weeks so she could have an understanding of how it worked. Even a non-diabetic will have BG fluctuations, usually in the ranges of 70-100ish pre-meal, and 100-130ish post-meal. My husband will occasionally ask me to check his BG if he feels shaky, and I’ve seen him as low as about 66. My stepdaughter is a nurse and checked herself over the weekend because she was feeling sick, and she was about 110 fasting, so she probably was fighting off something. But the curves would look like the classic ones your doc sketched out for you when you were first getting started, with a quick peaking action post-meal and gradually settling back down to normal range.
This is what we expect to see. My question is whether or not this has been explored in greater detail and with a larger sample base now that we have technology which makes it a lot more feasible to do that.
A lot of recent “discoveries” have followed from someone taking a closer look at a subject which was previously thought to be so well understood as to be boring. Yes, maybe the answer is it just looks like what’s in the textbooks. But I suspect that it might not be quite that simple, especially if one tests a wider range of people over a longer period of time using “better” tech.
The article @Richmatik linked to is definitely interesting. (It’s going to take me some time to read it so I can’t say much more than that for now.) It is also as he said somewhat old. It dates back to 2007 and, as we all know, there is a quantitative difference between the current CGM technology and what was available 8 years ago.
Can anyone point to anything more recent using the “better” CGM we now have?
Interesting trend graphs in that article. What struck me was not so much the numbers they were hitting pre- and post-meal, but how much more regular the curves look compared to mine, which are bouncing all over the place.
Interesting, @irrational_John had a similar issue. Some sites reject incoming linked images. I edited the post and uploaded the picture. Hopefully this fixes this problem.
Sensor glucose concentrations were 71-120 mg/dl for 91% of the day.
Sensor values were <or=60 or >140 mg/dl for only 0.2% and 0.4% of
the day, respectively. Sensor glucose concentrations were slightly
higher in children than adults (P = 0.009) and were slightly lower
during the night than day (95 vs. 99 mg/dl, P < 0.001).
Oh. I forgot to mention, for whatever it’s worth, that the title of the article is Variation of Interstitial Glucose Measurements Assessed by Continuous Glucose Monitors in Healthy, Nondiabetic Individuals.
The first endo I saw told me he wore a CGM for a week and never could get his BG much over 120 no matter what he ate, he had a very well behaved pancreas!
Did this endo who wore the CGM mention which CGM it was? Or say anything about how it felt to wear & use it?
Regardless of the details, I sure wish more endos would follow this example. There are insights I feel you can only truly “get” from personal experience.
It was the G7, the G4 was just about to come to market though. He didn’t really say much about how it felt other than that he was clearly surprised he couldn’t get it any higher despite eating lots of carbs and sugar. So I do think that gave him some insight into what it may be like to restrict your diet and still struggle with roller coaster BG.
In hindsight I also wonder if he cross checked the G7’s results by doing a BG finger stick. Possibly not … I mean why would he think to do that? To us, it’s pretty much hard wired to check and see if our BG is about where we “think” it may be when what we see doesn’t match our gut feeling. But for him, possibly not so much?
I’m thinking about this because I’ve read comments in the past that the G7 was perhaps not as reliable as the G4 is currently considered to be. So I’m wondering if it just might not have caught the relatively minor rise in his BGs?
I believe he did check with a meter also, he seemed determined to get his BG higher than 120. He told me about his experiment after saying going over 200 was ok because I didn’t stay there very long, after some discussion he changed his tune and admitted “normal” people won’t go that high, i.e. his own Dexcom trial and inability to raise his BG even to 130.
