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grahar64yesterday at 7:55 PM3 repliesview on HN

Looked after my son who has T1D for now 5 years, checked keytones maybe 20 times. Compared to blood glucose which we check look at every 5 minutes.

Maybe this is more for Type 2 or other diabetes, or for people prone to DKA. Or it is for people with a working pancreas who think looking at their blood sugars (and now keytones) tells them something like soothsayers reading tea leaves


Replies

happyopossumyesterday at 7:58 PM

Considering that DKA accounts for 160k hospital admissions a year, your lived experience translates poorly to such a flippant dismissal.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/about/diabetic-ketoacidosis.htm...

show 4 replies
cynicalsecurityyesterday at 8:53 PM

Mate they won't understand. People generally are exceptionally ignorant about type 1 diabetes and also eager to fall for marketing gimmicks like this one. They have no idea what type 1 diabetes is.

For anyone who doesn't get it: glucose is checked every five minutes because it changes very often, jumping or falling dangerously. It's a nightmare. Checking glucose is 1000 times more important than ketones which are almost never a problem. If you get accurate glucose readings you are highly unlikely to ever experience ketoacidosis in the first place. Before ketones become a problem, glucose has to stay high for hours. Abbott is pulling this marketing trick instead of improving the quality of their sensors. Libre 2 is absolute crap. Libre 3 is somewhat okay and sometimes even mediocre - which is still a pretty bad situation. Bad glucose sensor is a nightmare and it can kill a person or a child much likely than ketoacidosis. It will actually lead to ketoacidosis by showing incorrect glucose readings. Now I wonder whether they added a ketone sensor as a failsafe for their low quality glucose sensors.

No one asked them to add a ketone sensor as an add-on to their glucose sensor, except maybe their marketing department. People want higher quality glucose sensors that fail less often and are more accurate. Glucose sensors, not ketones!

gluboy1yesterday at 8:02 PM

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