medwireNews: Flash glucose monitoring confers similar benefits for diabetes patients in the real world as for those using it in clinical trials, research shows.
Patients achieved the expected reductions in hypoglycemia after initiating the technology, and these were sustained for 6 months, Jan Bolinder (Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden) reported at the Advanced Technologies & Treatments for Diabetes conference in Vienna, Austria.
The real-world data were uploaded by 4793 patients in clinical practice who started using flash monitoring for the first time. These patients were compared with participants of the IMPACT trial, and so had the same inclusion criteria, having relatively well-controlled diabetes with a glycated hemoglobin level no higher than 7.5%.
During the first 6 months of using the device, the real-world patients had more than 712,000 hypoglycemic episodes, defined as blood glucose falling below 70 mg/dL (3.9 mmol/L) for at least 15 minutes.
However, their time spent in hypoglycemia fell from an average of 121 to 106 minutes per day from the end of the first 2-week period of flash monitoring to the end of the first 6 months – a significant 12% reduction that was similar to the 11% reduction observed in IMPACT. Likewise, the time spent below 54 mg/dL (3.0 mmol/L; serious hypoglycemia) fell by 11% compared with 10% in IMPACT.
The team did not have pre-baseline data for time the real-world patients spent in hypoglycemia. In IMPACT, patients were initially spending an average of 218 minutes/day in hypoglycemia and most of the reduction in hypoglycemia occurred during the first 2 weeks of use, after which point (ie, baseline for the real-world patients), it was 137 minutes/day.
Similar to the trends seen in IMPACT, patients started off doing around 20 scans of their glucose data per day during the first few weeks; this then fell to and stabilized at around 14 scans per day. Most scans occurred during the day, particularly just before bedtime, but Bolinder highlighted that patients often performed one or two scans overnight.
Scanning frequency was linked to hypoglycemia outcomes, he noted, with a higher scanning frequency associated with less time spent in hypoglycemia and serious hypoglycemia.
Bolinder concluded that flash glucose monitoring in the real world leads to “similar sustained reductions in hypoglycemia that were observed in clinical trials in individuals with well-controlled diabetes.”
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