I have some old vials of Humalog in my fridge from literally nine years ago. I never used them because I preferred to use the Quickpen.
I have just gotten the Omnipod where I am now filling it from a vial. I’m wondering about these old Humalog vials. They are still sealed in the boxes they came in and have been continuously refrigerated. Is there any chance they could still be used? I suppose I could inject some and see if it works.
Just wondering…
That is really the best test as you have no idea how stable your refrigeration has been all these years.
I would throw them away. If the stuff fails, the results are so disastrous that its not worth it. If your starting new tech, that’s enough risk. You don’t need to do that.
There’s the potential for partially effective insulin, fully effective insulin, or totally non-effective insulin. The result is that you have no idea how much insulin your taking. That’s a recipe for failure. You stand to loose expensive pods this way. Cut your losses. You need to evaluate if your dose is effective in a new device and know that any failures are hardware failure.
I would not recommend injecting. Insulin breaks down and what the break down products are, I don’t know, but the thought of injecting unknown chemicals into my body is not appealing.
Not worth it. Throw it away. Don’t play russian roulette with a bullet in every chamber…
Personally I think you should probably throw it away. However I do want to give some input about using outdated insulin. Please note, what I am about to say is not something I recommend at all. I have a friend that is a pharmacist. He told me, insulin, if kept cool, is good up to a year after expiration.
That said, I changed to Basaglar a little over a year ago. I had been using Novolin N from Walmart before. I still had a partial vial of Novolin N left in the fridge so I recently decided to try it and finish it off. Some people might say it was a foolish idea. Because diabetes is a self-management disease, I merely told my endo what I was doing, and she said she wouldn’t recommend it but I definitely could try it but change my dosing to during the day instead of during the night so that I could keep on eye on it. But I am here to say that I didn’t have any complications or concerns.
As I said above, I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS IN ANY WAY AT ALL. It went fine for me, and I had doctors involved. My endo is really amazing and knows that I work hard to take care of myself, so she just makes sure that in trying things I don’t get hurt. Honestly I thought she would recommend throwing it out, but after she made her necessary disclaimers she said that I could try it if I was willing to touch base each day and let her know if I had any issues. She could also watch my CGM as it is connected to her clinic. I survived without any problems. That is my experience with expired insulin.