Basal testing questions

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mum2westiesGill

mum2westiesGill

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Relationship to Diabetes
Type 1
Are you not allowed to eat or drink anything at all when doing a basal test?

If you start with overnight and your last meal is teatime when can you have your next meal?

What are the reasons when you cancel a basal test?
 
You are able to drink water but nothing else. The instructions are linked here which explains the times you cancel the test https://www.mysugr.com/en/blog/basal-rate-testing/

The suggested timings are also given in the article. You can change these timings but you cover the whole 24hrs of the day with whatever timings you choose. So eg overnight is suggested 10pm to 6am you wouldn’t eat or drink anything after 6pm until 6am. You don’t have to eat at 6am though, I know you like your breakfast nearer say 11am so you could do until 11am as your overnight test. Then when you do your morning test you’d just start that a bit later than 6am if you’re not normally up then.
 
The idea is that you do it in chunks over several days, not all 24 hours at once, so tackle the overnight as Lucy says, then do chunks of day, first missing your breakfast so you see what happens after you get up and during the morning, up til lunchtime, then have your lunch, Then the next day, have breakfast, but skip lunch, and see what happens during the afternoon.
The bit of the day that you are testing in each case, is the bit from when any previous bolus has run out, and you haven’t bolused for, or eaten, the next meal.
If your blood sugar drops, and you think you might go hypo, that’s the time to stop and eat something, and try again another day,
 
For a basal test I use a 24 hour chart. As you suggested Gill I would go for overnight fist. I would eat early the Evening before and avoid fatty meals which delay the processing of carbs. Then the test is valid four hours after that (when the carbs and insulin should have done their work). I then have no breakfast, and delay my lunch as far as I can so I can clock off a good few hours. As the link tells you you can then miss a different meal each day.

I found that the whole process took me a good few days as if I needed to make big changes I then wanted to retest that period. Also there were some days it just wasn’t convenient. I worked round my days and the test doesn’t need to be done on consecutive days.
 
So the test starts 4 hours after your last meal to allow for the bolus insulin to finish working. Then you have only basal on board which is what you are testing. You then need to wait at least another 4 or 5 hours before eating anything else otherwise you won’t get any useful data. If you want to leave it longer that’s fine, it will be more useful! But of course life gets in the way and it can be difficult to find a day when you’ve got the time to do basal testing, and when you’ll be OK missing a meal.

You can’t eat anything at all during a basal test and can only drink plain water, anything else might affect your blood sugar and then you don’t know if the change is because your basal needs adjusting or because of the food. We were told once that it’s OK to eat some fat and protein, so were allowed to snack e.g. one egg scrambled, or one frankfurter sausage, one sugar free jelly etc, however even though there’s no carbs in any of that, every time daughter ate anything her blood sugar went up a little. Which then defeats the object of the test, so we have to be strictly no food at all now when basal testing.

Reasons to abandon the test would be if you went hypo, in which case you obviously have to treat it, then try again another day. If you go low again at the same time on the next attempt that would definitely suggest that something needs adjusting! Also if you go very high (high teens) and need to correct, also then try again another day and see if the same thing happens.
 
I hope I'm doing this the right way

Last meal & bolus was
9:48am breakfast 7.0 within target - I had 2x rounds of toast and a cup if tea for breakfast

4 hours after breakfast and which would normally be lunchtime but I'm skipping my lunch and bolus
13:48pm 5.7 within target

Then I will test at
14:48pm
15:48pm
16:48pm
17:48pm
 
Sounds good - you don’t have to do them exactly on 48 minutes past, a few minutes either way won’t hurt, the idea is that at the end of the test period you shouldn’t be more than about 2 or 3 mmol/l away from where you started and no big jumps or drops in the meantime. Good luck!
 
Sally71 said:
Sounds good - you don’t have to do them exactly on 48 minutes past, a few minutes either way won’t hurt, the idea is that at the end of the test period you shouldn’t be more than about 2 or 3 mmol/l away from where you started and no big jumps or drops in the meantime. Good luck!
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Thank you @Sally71 - I will keep posting bgls as I go along if that's ok.

I would kill though for just a little bit to eat or drink.

Can I get on with housework ?

Tea might be a bit later than 17:48pm so is this ok?

So because I've missed lunch is this the lunchtime basal test?

When does the next basal test have to be?
 
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14:49pm 4.5
 
How are you now Gill? Given your lack of hypo awareness I wouldn't have left an hour from the 4.5 to test again xx
 
Kaylz said:
How are you now Gill? Given your lack of hypo awareness I wouldn't have left an hour from the 4.5 to test again xx
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15:55pm 3.3 - test stopped and I'm currently munching on 4x dextrose tablets

What do I do now at my 15 minute hypo check?
I would love something to eat but how many carbs do I have?

Tea which is a chicken casserole and either potatoes or pasta isn't ready until 6:30pm ish
 
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16:11pm 3.7 15 minute hypo check - having 2x dextrose tablets
 
Sorry Gill only just saw your reply, just do what you would usually do after you are back in range hun so your biscuits I think you usually have? Or something slow release with the same amount of carbs as the biscuits, you could even have 1 slice of toast, have you any cooked meat or cheese you could have on your slice of toast? I hope your levels are up soon xx
 
Kaylz said:
Sorry Gill only just saw your reply, just do what you would usually do after you are back in range hun so your biscuits I think you usually have? Or something slow release with the same amount of carbs as the biscuits, you could even have 1 slice of toast, have you any cooked meat or cheese you could have on your slice of toast? I hope your levels are up soon xx
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Thanks @Kaylz and my levels are certainly back in range because they are now over range lol 16:34pm 11.0 - I'm going to have a sandwich of 1 round of hovis medium white with lancashire cheese on.
The sandwich can be like a late lunch - I did the bolus advisor but instead of putting 18g of carbs in I knocked 15g off and put 3g in and it suggested 0.5 units humalog.
It's all been a bit of a mess and I wished I'd never done it now. I'll see what happens when I have my tea at around 6:30 - 7pm ish.

Has this bit of data shown anything? I don't know!
 
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Oh that was bad luck, when you’ve actually worked up the enthusiasm to do a basal test (and I believe it’s REALLY hard trying not to eat anything at all!), it’s really annoying if you have to abandon it! Hope you are OK now.
Try the test again another day and see what happens. If you go low again, and weren’t being any more active than usual, then it might suggest that your basal is too high. Although it’s different for us on a pump, we could adjust that bit of the day only, so hopefully someone else on MDI will advise you what to do with long acting insulin!
Regarding other tests, all together you have to split the day into four parts and do the tests whenever you can, not all at once! You need to:
A) miss out breakfast
B) miss out lunch
C) miss out evening meal
D) overnight test every 2 hours
Probably a good idea to leave at least one normal day between one test and another, and of course it depends what else you have going on in your life, it can be a bit of a faff and take quite a while before you fit them all in. In fact I don’t think we’ve ever tried to do the full set, we just target whichever bit of the day we think we might have a problem in.
 
19:02pm before tea and it's up from 11.0 to 13.0 - 64g of carbs for tea - 6.5 units humalog food - 1.5 units correction
 
Can you drink diet coke or lime squash no added sugar during the test?
 
mum2westiesGill said:
Can you drink diet coke or lime squash no added sugar during the test?
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It’s best to stick to water. The caffeine or sweeteners or traces of sugar in other drinks can affect your levels.
 
Agree - there was another parent on here who hasn’t posted for ages, who used to let her son drink Diet Coke during basal tests, but his blood sugars still went up - even though she couldn’t understand why, it happened too often to be pure coincidence. Best to stick to water. It’s only for a few hours then you can treat yourself with a big meal and nice drinks when you get to the end!
 
Sally71 said:
It’s only for a few hours then you can treat yourself with a big meal and nice drinks when you get to the end!
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The only test where I wouldn’t be able to treat myself to a big meal would be the evening test aka teatime - I would be having lunch around 1pm - 2pm then skip tea then the test would start around 6pm until 10pm which would be bedtime.

If I've got this right for the other tests
Overnight would start around bedtime around 10pm - 11pm so I would have to try my best not to have my usual little bedtime snack

Breakfast aka morning would mean skipping breakfast but what time would this test start? This test because of my job I could only do at a weekend.

Lunch aka afternoon - I did this the other - I had breakfast then missed lunch - test started at 1:48pm but I ended up hypo and I have a terrible feeling I would end up hypo again.

Have I got these right?
Overnight test
Morning - is testing for breakfast
Afternoon - is testing for lunch
Evening - is testing for tea
 
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