Hi have been to GP today who wanted to reduce my Metformin to once daily, I have been on twice daily recently and I’m worried that the reduction will
have a adverse effect on blood glucose levels.
How have others found reducing their Metformin ...?
My non-expert guess is that Metformin is doing sod-all for your BG at your current levels.
I dropped it last year after HbA1c had been at "normal" levels for several months. I noticed post-prandial BG levels went slightly higher for a few days & then settled back to previous levels and stayed there. My last HbA1c a few weeks ago was 5.3% / 34, continuing a slowly declining trend from 40 in September 2018 (ignoring a spurious-looking 27 result in May last year).
Met acts mainly by increasing insulin sensitivity, and the biggest part of that liver insulin sensitivity. One of the main features of T2D is reduced liver insulin sensitivity => liver produces too much glucose, particularly overnight/when fasting => high waking BG levels.
Once your waking BG is down to a "normal" level, it's likely that yr liver has fixed its insulin sensitivity probs (typically by losing weight and clearing the liver of fat), and there's nothing much for Met to do on that front.
The other Met impact is to improve muscle insulin sensitivity, which you can mainly see in post-prandial BG levels. Met can continue to play a role in that, but it might not be that important, particuarly if yr post-prandial levels aren't very high.
There's also a bunch of research showing opposite effects: in some people Met can actually interefere with insulin sensitivity improvements from exercise. From experimenting, I think that was the case with me, which is the a reason why I dopped the Met.
Anyway, that was my experience & understanding. Why not just try dropping it and experimenting for a week or so? You can always go back.
