During the DAFNE course I was told that basal testing should be done before making changes to the basal insulin.
However, I'm now wondering if this is good advice given recent experience, and would be interested to hear what other type 1's actually do with respect to basal adjustment?
Here's what I ended up doing in a real life situation:
I noticed at the start of last week that my blood glucose was dropping in the morning and in the afternoon, 3 hours after bolus. My suspicion then was that my morning levemir dose of 9u was now too high for me. This is probably due to a combination of getting back into running recently, and doing high protein meals in the evening to fix my dawn phenomenon.
So I ended up reducing the morning basal, and progressively reduced it to a point where, at the end of the week, I was only taking 5u levemir in the morning.
At the end of the week, I then did an afternoon basal test. No food, no caffiene, etc.
12pm - 7.4 mmol/l
1pm - 8.0 mmol/l
2pm - 7.8 mmol/l
3pm - 7.4 mmol/l
4pm - 7.3 mmol/l
5pm - 6.3 mmol/l
6pm - 6.0 mmol/l
So the morning basal is just about holding. It does appear that my decision to reduce the morning basal was correct in this case.
I expect my morning basal may actually drop more as my running intensifies in preparation for a half marathon, so I'm wondering if there are caveats I should be aware of to just reducing it if I see dropping BGs 3 hours after a bolus?
However, I'm now wondering if this is good advice given recent experience, and would be interested to hear what other type 1's actually do with respect to basal adjustment?
Here's what I ended up doing in a real life situation:
I noticed at the start of last week that my blood glucose was dropping in the morning and in the afternoon, 3 hours after bolus. My suspicion then was that my morning levemir dose of 9u was now too high for me. This is probably due to a combination of getting back into running recently, and doing high protein meals in the evening to fix my dawn phenomenon.
So I ended up reducing the morning basal, and progressively reduced it to a point where, at the end of the week, I was only taking 5u levemir in the morning.
At the end of the week, I then did an afternoon basal test. No food, no caffiene, etc.
12pm - 7.4 mmol/l
1pm - 8.0 mmol/l
2pm - 7.8 mmol/l
3pm - 7.4 mmol/l
4pm - 7.3 mmol/l
5pm - 6.3 mmol/l
6pm - 6.0 mmol/l
So the morning basal is just about holding. It does appear that my decision to reduce the morning basal was correct in this case.
I expect my morning basal may actually drop more as my running intensifies in preparation for a half marathon, so I'm wondering if there are caveats I should be aware of to just reducing it if I see dropping BGs 3 hours after a bolus?
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