The SEMG Cardiovascular Disease and Diabetes Working Group.
The III Diabetes Training Foruminaugurated today in Toledo by the Spanish Society of General and Family Physicians (SEMG) within the framework of its meeting ‘United in Cardiometabolic Health’, incorporates into its practical workshops the latest developments on the management and approach of diabetesamong them, the flash glucose monitoring. It is a system designed to measure glucose levels in the interstitial fluid in people with diabetes that facilitates adequate self-management of diabetes and better control of blood glucose in these patients.
The members of the SEMG Cardiovascular Disease and Diabetes Working Group, Mercedes Retamal Ortiz and the nurse Eva Sáez Torralbaexplain that this system consists of a sensor that is placed on the arm and changed every 14 days, and a reader that might be the mobile phone itself. The aforementioned sensor performs glucose readings every minute (to obtain these readings, it is necessary for the person to have at least one scan every 8 hours).
“But not only will it show us the blood glucose levels at the time of reading, but it also provides us with past information (8 hours before) and future (using the trend arrows)”, according to Retamal. These trend arrows indicate the speed at which blood glucose will decrease or increase in the next few minutes; In this way, “it helps us manage how much fast-acting insulin would need to be injected in addition to the patient’s usual dose.”
Another important fact is that through the application of this system of flash monitoring of glucose “we can program reminders so that we do not forget to scan the sensor and thus set alarms that will notify us if we are facing hypo or hyperglycemia”, as reported by this specialist who works as a family doctor in the Don Benito Oeste Health Center from Badajoz. In addition to allowing real-time data analysis, flash glucose monitoring provides a computing platform in which they can download glucose monitoring informationgenerating what is known as the “Ambulatory Glucose Profile Report” (AGP).
Patients who can benefit from the tool
For her part, the nurse Eva Sáez explained that the AGP report offers a set of standardized reports with information and graphs that show, for example, glucose goals and time in range, average glucose, glycemic variability, low or high glucose events, daily glucose profiles, etc. This allows health personnel, together with the patient, “a retrospective analysis of the information of days and weeks and an assessment of the degree of control, which helps in making therapeutic decisions”.
Sáez reported that the financing by the National system of health of “Flash” type monitoring was approved in 2017 in people under 18 years of age with type 1 diabetes (DM1), whose coverage was expanded in 2018 and 2019 to adults with DM1. In April of this year, it was approved for people with type 2 diabetes mellitus with intensive insulin therapy, establishing specific requirements and criteria that appear in the resolution, proposing as a deadline for its implementation in the autonomous communities until December 31, 2024 For this reason, according to this nurse specialized in diabetes education, “it is necessary that health professionals are trained in this such a useful tool for people with diabetes”.
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