Continuous Glucose Monitoring
By Dr Anusha Khan
Continuous Glucose Monitoring is a tremendously beneficial behavior modification tool for longevity and healthspan improvement!
This technology isn't just for diabetics!
Longevity and improved health span (living longer withOUT disease) has a lot to do with maintaining stable glucose levels, irrespective of carrying the diagnosis of diabetes. I’m talking about the use of Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) device for NON-diabetics! This technology works as a behavior modification tool! Patients can gain introspection into how different foods affect their glucose levels in real-time. Huge spikes, increased variations in levels and high post-feeding glucose levels are all precursors to impending diabetes. You’ll find that mood and energy is also greatly affected by swings in glucose levels. Learning to lower those glucose spikes and decreasing how frequently they occur can do wonders to stave off cardiovascular disease and diabetes for as long as possible. That kind of behavioral impact is what CGM device brings to the table. It’s about TAKING ACTION to improve health BEFORE disease has a chance to occur.
In the field of Longevity Medicine, this tool is surprisingly insightful!
This article published in JAMA (a highly regarded medical journal) talks about how measuring your glucose levels can help you realize how your body is processing certain foods when it comes to glycemic control. High peaks in glucose levels can be an early precursor to impending diabetes (and cardiovascular disease), despite a normal HbA1c (a test used to screen for diabetes). Learning this personalized information can lead to behavior modification when it comes to selecting foods , resulting in overall improved health and decreased risk of developing disease.
This article published in the American Diabetes Association (ADA) demonstrated that patients who would NOT qualify as Diabetics (HbA1c range from 5.0-6.5), with mean age 52 followed over 15 years, STILL had increased risk for all-cause mortality and death from CVD, coronary heart disease, and cerebral infarction the closer they were to HbA1c of 6.5, which by technical terms, would be “pre-diabetes”.
What does that mean? It means that a normal HbA1c, although making you a non-diabetic, does not tell you anything about your glucose peaks, frequency of those peaks and glucose level variations. Steady state glucose is one of the most essential things in staving off disease for as long as possible so that you live longer WITHOUT disease. That’s what the field of Longevity and healthspan improvement is all about.
UPDATE:
While we are on the subject of Longevity, we would like to share that we have officially launched the Longevity arm of our practice! By focusing on nutrition science, lipidology for cardiovascular/inflammatory assessment, principles of endocrinology, exercise physiology and sleep physiology, we aim to minimize the risk of chronic disease onset, while simultaneously improving healthspan (quality of life). We plan to incorporate use of Continuous Glucose Monitoring to help our patients gain endocrine insight into the mosaic of their health. We can use this data as one of many tools to improve and optimize their overall health.
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Do you, CGM?