|
- |
| Home
>
Technology- >
Full Story |
|
|
|
New
technology for continuous blood glucose measurement
EHM
News Bureau -
The
M V Diabetes Specialities Centre (MVDSC) at Chennai has
introduced a new technology for the evaluation of diabetes
control called Continuous Glucose Monitoring System (CGMS).
CGMS helps to measure the blood glucose levels of a patient
continuously upto 72 hours at a time and provides a detailed
analysis and graph for the whole period. CGMS has been
made possible by the development of a unique glucose sensor
which measures the body’s glucose levels from the
interstitial fluid just beneath the skin. The sensor measures
the glucose every 10 seconds and gives an average reading
every 5 minutes for 72 hours (288 readings every 24 hours).
This information is stored in a monitor (which is the
size of a pager) and this can be clipped to the waist
of the patient. The test is continued for 3 days and the
patient is allowed to continue his or her normal activities.
The data when downloaded into a computer, produces a graph
which provides very valuable information about glucose
fluctuations during the whole day and is an excellent
indication of the high (peaks) and low (troughs or valleys)
sugar readings.
CGMS
is especially useful in detecting silent hypoglycemic
episodes particularly in the night and in the treatment
of "brittle diabetes". It also helps to solve
the hitherto unexplained puzzle as to why some patients
have near normal blood sugar levels when tested in the
clinic in the usual way by doing fasting and postprandial
blood sugar estimators appear to have unsatisfactory glycosylated
haemoglobin levels (3 months control test). Uncontrolled
diabetes predisposes on to develop long term complications
affecting the eyes, kidneys, heart, feet and nerves. The
CGMS technology has been approved for clinical use by
the FDA in the USA and MVDSC is the first to use this
new technology. |
|
|
|
|
