Continuous glucose monitoring got a big boost at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association, which kicked off last week in San Francisco.

Tracing the history of real time CGMs back to GlucoWatch in 2001, Roy Beck, an epidemiologist and executive director, Jaeb Center for Health Research in Tampa, Florida, explained how CGMs are becoming the standard of care in Type 1 diabetes.

But patients and providers need to know how different CGMs stack up against each other to make a decision on what is best. Beck provided a number of useful slides in his presentation that can help to make comparisons. First up, is an enumeration of each CGM’s features.

From the ADA meeting presentation of Roy Beck

Senseonics’s Eversense CGM needs to be surgically implanted in a clinic but is approved for use for 90 days in the U.S. and 180 days in Europe making it the longest-lasting of all the sensors powering the CGMs.

A few terms from the chart require clarification — for instance, BGM 2X/d means that Medtronic’s Guardian 3 CGM sensor and its competing device from Senseonics need to be calibrated against a blood glucose meter reading two times daily.

Compare that to Abbott’s intermittent scanning CGM device (isCGM) or Dexcom’s G6 CGM that do not require such fingerstick calibration.

Most CGMS are also able to to alert patients with alarms regarding their glucose levels. Abbott’s Libre doesn’t currently offer those but a future version — the Libre 2 — will have that option, Beck noted.

Dexcom G6 and Abbott Libre have FDA indication for non-adjunctive use, which means that they could support insulin dosing (treatment decisions) based on readings that do not separately need to be confirmed by a blood glucose meter reading. Last week, Senseonics received FDA approval for non-adjunctive use thereby joining Dexcom’s G6 and Abbott’s Libre that enjoy the same designation. Medtronic is the only company to not have this labeling for its CGM.

Beck also provided information on how accurate these four different CGM systems are.

From the ADA meeting presentation of Roy Beck

Pointed to the above slide, he said  “Senseonics is maybe a little better” than its peers in the overall accuracy standard set by FDA, but the real difference lies in the accuracy in reading hypoglycemia.

“The Abbott Libre, the current version, is not nearly as accurate as the other three,” Beck said. “That really is where Dexcom G6 is shining … (and better than) what it was in earlier generations — G4 or G5 for hypoglycemia.”

It comes as no surprise then that as overall accuracy of these CGM sensors have improved, so has CGM penetration in Type 1 diabetes patients.

From the ADA meeting presentation of Roy Beck

Featured Photo: marchmeena29, Getty Images
Slide Phots: Arundhati Parmar