Individuals with advanced stage of type 2 diabetes need to control their blood sugar level through insulin therapy as poor management of blood glucose levels can lead to serious and life-threatening complications including kidney failure, vision damage and heart disease.
Unfortunately, many diabetic patients have difficulty controlling their blood sugar level with insulin injections, which must be administered several times during the day. Insulin injection has been the standard of care for many years but it just does not work for up to a third of diabetic patients.
Individuals with hard to treat diabetes may instead opt for insulin pumps as results of a new study found them to be better in controlling blood sugar levels in type 2 diabetes patients compared with the standard therapy. While insulin injections require manual shots that need to be administered several times per day, insulin pumps do not require self-injection and works by delivering constant amounts of insulin using a catheter that is placed under the patient's skin.
For a study published in the Lancet on July 03, which involved 331 type 2 diabetes patients between 30 and 75 years old, Yves Reznik, from the University of Caen Cote de Nacre Regional Hospital Center in Caen, France, and colleagues randomly assigned 168 of the participants to use pumps for their insulin treatment and the rest of the participants continued getting insulin through multiple daily injections.
After six months, the researchers observed that the patients who used insulin pumps had significant reduction in their average blood glucose levels compared with those who used injection. Of those who used insulin pumps, 55 percent reached the blood sugar control target range while only 28 percent of those who used injections did.
"In patients with poorly controlled type 2 diabetes despite using multiple daily injections of insulin, pump treatment can be considered as a safe and valuable treatment option," the researchers interpreted the results of their Medtronic-funded study.
By the end of the study period, the patients who used insulin pumps also required 20 percent lower dose of insulin daily compared with the patients who used injection. Patients belonging to the pump group also experienced high blood sugar almost three hours less per day compared with those who belonged to the injection group.
"Our findings open up a valuable new treatment option for those individuals failing on current injection regimens and may also provide improved convenience, reducing the burden of dose tracking and scheduling, and decreasing insulin injection omissions," Reznik said.
