Dexcom Gets Approval for a 7 day CGMS
Dexcom is already has one continuous glucose monitor on the market, so what is the big deal? Well, recently the FDA approved SEVEN which is Dexcom’s seven day continuous glucose monitor. The sensors last more than twice as long which means that it costs less than half as much.
Continuous glucose monitoring is really the holy grail of Type 1 Diabetes. It is actually more important than having an insulin pump, because knowing when your blood sugar is high or low requires a finger stick and a blood to be placed on a small test strip. That is hard to do when you are asleep. And if your blood sugar goes low when you are asleep it is very dangerous. I know from experience, and many times I start to get low blood sugar in my dreams and that is when I know that I need to get up and eat something. These continuous glucose monitors have a simple alarm that would wake you up when your sugar gets below a certain preset level.
Insurance companies still will not pay for a continuous glucose monitor. While I don’t like US health insurance companies in general, I sometimes have a hard time blaming them for something like this because Dexcom, Minimed and the other big pharma players that make a CGMS charge quite a lot for it. The Dexcom starter kit is $800 which isn’t too bad, but their sensors are a whopping $35/per! Considering that they only last 3 days, that is over $10 bucks a day in additional expenses that are not covered by any insurance company as they are waiting for studies to show how useful they are for diabetic complications. They should really just start paying for these things ASAP because they will prevent short term diabetic complications with low-blood sugar which probably costs them a boatload in hospitalization expenses.
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