I was just curious, we are getting a Dexcom soon and I was wondering what level other parents set the low and high alarms for during the day and the night. Do you keep it the same for day and night, or do you raise the low setting at night so that you have more of a heads-up if the blood sugar is dropping?
We used the Dex 7+ for 2 years, & have started our 2nd year on the G4. Our low has always been set to 80 to allow for the lag time. The pediatric clinical trials for the G4 showed less accuracy at lower ranges, & that’s been our experience as well. For a small child I would probably set it even higher.
Our high alert is set to 180, but my daughter is almost 16 & we homeschool. When she attended public school we set the alert to 250 so it wouldn’t be so distracting for the class. Frequent alarms can become annoying.
We have only been a dex com user for a week- so there is not much "wisdon" yet. What I can say is that we set it at 69 and 180. The first night it woke my 13 year old with a low- it was great. I think we should put the high setting higher, as it is easy to ignore at 180 and he was running 300's for half a day. We wish there were more alarm varieties- like a "hey-pay attention" sound vs a :May-day May-Day!". Yesterday he felt low and cgm said 80, but it was off more than usual- and he was in the high 50's. I look forward to hearing what others say!
A couple of great resources:
Gary Scheiner offers a class (pre-recorded, Getting the Most From Your Continuous Glucose Monitor) at Type1U
Peter Chase (author of Understanding Diabetes, aka the Pink Panther book) has written a great book for those new to pumping/CGMs. You can access the online version here.
Chapters 15 thru 17 cover CGMs.
We set it at 70 for a low alert and 180 for a high alert. But at night, we set it for 70 and 130. Since she's not eating while she is sleeping, she really shouldn't be going higher than 130. We find that if she is sleeping on the arm that she has her Dexcom on, it will beep at 70, even though she is about 90 when we test her with a test strip. I think when the Dexcom is pressed between her and the mattress it makes her Blood sugar read much lower than it actually is. Just want to add that we always double check with a test strip before giving insulin to correct a high or a tab to correct a low.
Thanks so much for the input!