Spiker
Well-Known Member
- Messages
- 4,685
- Type of diabetes
- Type 1
- Treatment type
- Pump
I agree that CGM is life changing. Using one halved my average BG with one third of the variability. But even though I own one, I can't afford to run it at the moment. They are very expensive. But in my personal opinion (anecdotal evidence only) they are far more cost effective than pumps in improving control. That may be different for other people (particularly people with complex basal demands).
The fairest thing in my opinion would be to give all diabetics, particularly [insulin dependent] diabetics, access to a CGM (as the OP suggested). If hospitals had a pool of CGMs they could give them out for say a month at a time to diabetics maybe around 6 - 12 months after diagnosis, and maybe at 1 to 2 year intervals after that. Most of the benefits are in discovering patterns that can then be locked in for a year or more. This would be 12 times cheaper and allow 12 times as many people to get say 80% of the benefit of CGM.
I think it would be smart if the CGM manufacturers paid for this themselves, because there is little doubt it would pave the way for widespread adoption of CGM. It would build popular demand, HCP acceptance, and a massive evidence base for NICE to use.
And apart from anything else, from a pure research viewpoint it would create a massive database of real time BG data that could be use to correlate things like SD to health outcomes, data which is sketchy at the moment, and also could be used to back validate HBa1c to average BG relationship in a way that is much stronger than the existing data.
The fairest thing in my opinion would be to give all diabetics, particularly [insulin dependent] diabetics, access to a CGM (as the OP suggested). If hospitals had a pool of CGMs they could give them out for say a month at a time to diabetics maybe around 6 - 12 months after diagnosis, and maybe at 1 to 2 year intervals after that. Most of the benefits are in discovering patterns that can then be locked in for a year or more. This would be 12 times cheaper and allow 12 times as many people to get say 80% of the benefit of CGM.
I think it would be smart if the CGM manufacturers paid for this themselves, because there is little doubt it would pave the way for widespread adoption of CGM. It would build popular demand, HCP acceptance, and a massive evidence base for NICE to use.
And apart from anything else, from a pure research viewpoint it would create a massive database of real time BG data that could be use to correlate things like SD to health outcomes, data which is sketchy at the moment, and also could be used to back validate HBa1c to average BG relationship in a way that is much stronger than the existing data.