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4mm Needle length

L

Landrover Jason

Member
Relationship to Diabetes
Type 1.5 LADA
I’ve been using 6mm needles, recently i was advised to go to 4mm which I did.
I’m convinced that novo rapid is less effective on 4mm needle…….. is this just me dreaming this.
What are decision points around needle length for T1?
 
A shorter needle is less invasive and therefore less damaging to injection sites I would have thought and the insulin only needs to be injected into subcutaneous fat. It would probably be quite unusual for someone to have skin thicker than 4mm..... unless someone is injecting through clothing, which is probably not recommended, so 4mm needles seem to be the norm for most of us, I believe.
 
Thinking about it, I wonder if 6mm needles might be useful for people who have developed lumpy injection sites, to help get the insulin beyond the lipohypertrophy, but ideally you want to avoid those lumpy sites not make them worse by injecting longer needles into them.
Do you have lumpy sites?
I will confess I have no real knowledge of the subject, I am just thinking it through with as much logic as I can muster this morning. Hopefully others will chip in who have more experience or knowledge of this. I am reasonably confident that 4mm needles are standard issue for most of us.
 
Hard to believe, but when I started this malarkey 30 years ago, the needles were 12mm! But then we were told to pinch up the skin and inject into the resulting hillock. I actually found half a box of 6mm needles when were clearing out our boat for sale in 2021, so I must have been using them at some stage in the previous 10 years.
 
@JJay - 20+ years ago I was mega sensitive to Novorapid to the extent that I injected it when my meal was in front of me and I'd frequently be hypo within the first few minutes of eating, so had to inject in the middle of the meal. This was with 5mm pen needles and ditto cannulas, then Roche stopped the 5mm 'soft' cannulas so I had to swap to 6mm.

Now having changed my pump and consumables to Ypso - for the first time in my life I'm using a steel cannula and it's 4mm. Hell thought I. OMG - my sensitivity to Novorapid has been restored, though I've been using it now since just before the turn of the century!
 
rebrascora said:
Thinking about it, I wonder if 6mm needles might be useful for people who have developed lumpy injection sites, to help get the insulin beyond the lipohypertrophy, but ideally you want to avoid those lumpy sites not make them worse by injecting longer needles into them.
Click to expand...
Yes, I doubt that's a recommended reason for using longer needles!

Here's a paper saying that yes, virtually everyone should be using short needles (admittedly it's saying that mostly in the introduction before giving a case where maybe a longer needle is appropriate).

Nontraditional Considerations With Insulin Needle Length Selection - PMC

Ensuring the correct delivery of insulin is essential in the treatment of diabetes. Both proper injection technique and needle length are important considerations for adequate insulin delivery. There have been several studies demonstrating that BMI ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
 
Landrover Jason said:
I’ve been using 6mm needles, recently i was advised to go to 4mm which I did.
I’m convinced that novo rapid is less effective on 4mm needle…….. is this just me dreaming this.
What are decision points around needle length for T1?
Click to expand...

Can't see it making any difference, sure when starting on novorapid was using 8mm needles then went on to use 4mm before switching to pump, injection site issues can affect how insulin is absorbed, could it be that?
 
It could be, although it could also be me. I switched to 4mm at the same time as switching jobs and becoming more home based….. probably more to do with increasing sedentary work. I wanted to get a sense of how different needle lengths might affect absorption. From the input above its seems it doesn’t and I should relax and move more
thanks all
 
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