Waking up with High Glucose levels
Waking up with high glucose or blood sugar levels, or “Dawn Phenomenon,” occurs in more than 80 percent of adults with type 1 diabetes.1 Personal continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and your insulin pump provide tools that can help you control Dawn Phenomenon.
How A Personal Continuous Glucose Management System Can Help
After wearing your personal Continuous Glucose Management (CGM) system for at least 24 hours, you can upload the data into CareLink® Personal Software. The software provides a “Sensor Daily Overview” report. This report can place up to seven days of data on one 24-hour time plot. This really helps you see glucose spikes during a particular time period.
For example, look at the early morning hours. Is there a consistent upward spike around 5:00 AM? If not 5:00 AM, is there one earlier or later in the morning? If you see a spike, you can work with your healthcare team to change your basal rate prior to the spike so that you can smooth out your overnight glucose control.
How Your Insulin Pump Can Help
If you don’t use a personal CGM system, you can still follow your overnight glucose levels using your blood glucose (BG) meter and an alarm clock. You will have to wake yourself up a couple times during the night to check your BG using your meter.
Ask your healthcare team for some guidance, but generally you will have to check a fingerstick BG at bedtime where it should be greater than 100 mg/dL, again during mid-sleep, and then when you wake up to see if your overnight basal rates are correct. Rather than writing down all of your readings, you can upload data from your blood glucose meter 2 into CareLink® Personal Software, along with your insulin pump so that you have all your information in one place.
Review your findings with your healthcare provider to pinpoint when you are experiencing dawn phenomenon. Your insulin pump can handle multiple basal rates across time periods customized to your needs. To match the increase in glucose levels caused by the dawn phenomenon, you can program your insulin pump to deliver a higher basal rate amount 2–3 hours before the dawn phenomenon starts, to just before it ends.
Your healthcare provider will want to verify any changes to your basal rates by reevaluating overnight BGs over the next two to three nights.
Next, see what to do about sick days.
- 1
- Perriello G, De Feo P, Torlone E, et al. The dawn phenomenon in type 1 (insulin-dependent) diabetes mellitus: magnitude, frequency, variability, and dependency on glucose counterregulation and insulin sensitivity. Diabetologia. 1991;34:21-28.
- 2
- Compare your choice of blood glucose meter with the list here to ensure it is compatible with CareLink Personal.
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