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Comment by bigmattystyles | Hacker News Reader

Friend of my wife, type 1, just 2 weeks ago died in his sleep from mismanaged blood sugar. He was only 37 and was otherwise very healthy - it was shocking, I never knew it was so dangerous and that mis measuring or forgetting before going to bed could have such dire consequences. I though it was like sleeping with your contacts in. This is a gap this tech could close, I hope it’s widely available soon - hopefully an artificial pancreas is near as well.

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That's really sad and tragic. There are like 50, or some other large number, things that affect blood glucose levels and we control 2 or 3 of them(insulin, food, and exercise). Your wife's friend may have done everything correctly and still had blood glucose that was too low.

This is why I sleep so much better since getting a CGM, it's life changing because one can make data driven decisions that minimize risk and be alerted when it's time to pay attention. It helps take away cognitive load that lessons the risk of burnout too.

I can't imagine what it was like as a T1 before them.

I was diagnosed T2 about 2.5 years ago, and worse a Freestyle Libre (not technically a CGM, but very close) for the first 6 months or so. Very useful for figuring out how I'd react to certain things, and I've got things pretty well under control now (A1C ~5.5)

That's awesome. Yeah, like anything using the data to make better decisions is the way, otherwise there's no point. Even as a T1, if my BG is high, I will generally(not always) eat less carb or none for a meal. Plus the changes in insulin dosing. It's just easier and injected insulin is so much slower than what the pancreas can do(both in time to react and duration)

Yes, it's tricky.

Low is much more dangerous than high...

As the saying goes, High glucose will kill you in 30 years, low gluclose in 30 minutes.

I'm sorry for your friend. Truth is even a lot of doctors don't appreciate how difficult controlling type 1 diabetes can be. Having lived with it for over 20 years I'm still shocked at how ill-prepared I was once I came home from the hospital.

CGMs can make all the difference in the world, and I hope they continue to get better.

Do you have any information about what happened?

(context: my son is DT1) We learn (in France) that hypoglycemia can lead to unconsciousness, but cannot be fatal as the liver will eventually take over and release glucose to the organism, as it always does for healthy persons. Glucagen injection is the way to get this release to happen fast, but it can be delayed if necessary.

Hypoglycemia can lead to coma and can cause death through several mechanisms including but not limited to:

- brain death during prolonged severe hypos

- or cardiac arrhythmias

Im T1 myself

In my wife’s friend’s case we’ve heard it led to an arrhythmia as you mentioned.

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