Monitoring Diabetes Control Hba1c and CGM: Advantages and Pitfalls

Monitoring glucose control using Hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) and Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) both have their advantages and pitfalls. HbA1c is a useful tool for the diagnosis and management of diabetes mellitus and generally an excellent marker of overall glycemic control for the preceding 8-12 weeks; however, the test is not without pitfalls. A suspicion of falsely high or low HbA1c should prompt clinicians to evaluate for possible causes. CGM provides real-time glucose readings, allowing users to see immediate changes in glucose levels all the time, track glucose trends, helping users understand how food, exercise, stress, or medications affect their glucose levels, and preventing hypoglycemia; however, many factors can affect the accuracy of CGM, cost and accessibility, sensor calibration and user overload can be problems sometimes. In this session, I will present few interesting cases on how to interpretate HbA1c result and CGM data appropriately after better understanding those tests.