Continuous glucose monitoring is helping diabetics and others do a better job of tracking their blood sugar and taking corrective action.
University of Washington diabetes researcher Dr. Irl Hirsch talked about that and its potential advancements earlier this year at a UW/Gonzaga Health Partnership event in Spokane and in our studio.
"Continuous glucose monitoring is a little filament that is usually painlessly inserted under the skin. And what this little filament does is it doesn't measure the blood sugar like you do when you do a finger prick, but rather, it measures fluid under the skin that is really microscopic. You don't see it, but this fluid has glucose that comes in from the blood, and so you are indirectly measuring the blood glucose with this little filament under the skin."
"What we're seeing now is people with pre-diabetes and people even without pre-diabetes wearing CGM. So they are able to see how certain foods, how certain situations, how that can impact you. One of the things that's so interesting to me is that the way individuals' glucose is impacted by stressors, by exercise, and by different foods, it's different in everybody."
"What I see happening is the fact that there are so many companies around the world trying to work on the non-invasive where you don't even have to do a poke. And whether it's this company in Israel, there's actually a company in Seattle that I don't work with at all, but there are companies all over the world working on it. And I'm of the belief that if you have so many people working on the same problem, eventually we are gonna have a commercial product."
