Benefits of a Continuous Glucose Monitor

Video transcription:

Hey everybody, this is Elizabeth Hanawalt and I am a diabetes educator and I’m a type 1 diabetic. I was just reading a story yesterday in one of the journals that I get, talking about the benefits of CGM. Now those of you all who don't know what that means, CGM is Continuous Glucose Monitor. That entails wearing a sensor on your arm, like this. What it does is it takes your blood sugar every so many minutes depending on which CGM sensor you have.

The benefits they have now proven, they already knew it for type 1, but they’ve done studies for type 2 and found out that there is no change in insulin dosing in those two groups. 1 group have a CGM, the other group just did repetitive glucose sticks fingers all day long; and what happened was people that have the CGM actually had a better overall A1C. It basically gave them a look at what is affecting blood sugar, and the improvements are not because of the medicine they were taking, the improvements were other things. It could be you can see that your glucose trending down, so you help get it back up. Or you can see how a meal that you just ate affected your blood sugar. So you can’t do this without a CGM.

The only problem with CGM is the cost. But I would say if any of you all have ever thought about it or wondered about it, ask your clinical person, doctor or nurse about a CGM and see what they say. Because you might get a whole lot better A1C and overall less risks of complications.

If you have questions about using a continuous glucose monitor, please send me a message.