Semglee basal doses

[Bat5]

I’ve had a few incidents of low blood sugar whilst sleeping recently. I’m on the freestyle libre 2 which normally wakes me so I fingerpick to double check. Sometimes it’s a false alarm and other times it’s a little low but has risen twenty minutes later and I’ve got up in the morning to a 5.5 or 6.5 which is ok. Do other users of the libre 2 find they sleep through low BG which then corrects itself?
Another issue is taking the units of semglee twenty minutes before bedtime which seems to then lower my BG to quickly before I go to bed, this has been part of my daily routine but something is obviously changing.
what times of night do fellow semglee users take their units, any suggestions?
Thanks

 

[Kaylz]

From what I've read about it it doesn't really have a "peak" time, as a Type 1 I'm assuming you are using a fast acting insulin as well? How long after your last dose of that is bedtime? It could just be that your basal needs are lowering, most of us need to adjust throughout the year as seasons change etc, maybe a basal test would be a good idea for you to conduct xx

 

[Bat5]

Im on fast acting as well and don’t tend to take after 8:30 pm if I can help it,but the issue with lowering basal needs is that the BG in the morning is to high at around 7 or 8 mmol which the diabetic nurses don’t like! Don the basal tests before which were useful I just seem to have to adjust basal intermittently to suit waking blood glucose.

 

[rebrascora]

As I understand it Semglee is insulin Glargine, the same as Lantus and according to the likes of @trophywench found it peaks quite heavily at 5hours I believe although the literature suggests the profile is flat.

I would recommend that you ask to change to a more flexible basal insulin, Levemir which is injected twice daily and allows you to adjust daytime and night time doses independently of each other. I find it best to set an alarm in the morning for an hour before I intend to get up and inject my morning dose and then go back to sleep.... all done without setting foot out of bed, so that it is active and doing it's magic by the time that I get up. I LOVE my Levemir for the flexibility it allows me, in that if I have had a very active day I can dial my evening dose back a couple of units and the impact of that change will be pretty immediate. It also enables me to have a lot more insulin in the morning when I need it and much less at night when I don't, so not a 50/50 split. I currently use 24 units in the morning and anywhere from 0-7 units on a night depending upon how active I have been.
I would also like to say that if your nurse is concerned about your waking readings being in the 7-8 range then she needs to get a life. Yes we would all like to have in range readings all the time but it is far more important not to be hypoing through the night than any concern about being a bit high in the morning, which you can quickly and easilt fix with a correction

Do you use the "time in target" function on your Libre with the target set at 3.9-10? That is a far better reflection of your diabetes management than worrying about being a bit above target on a morning.

 

[trophywench]

As I understand it Semglee is insulin Glargine, the same as Lantus and according to the likes of @trophywench found it peaks quite heavily at 5hours I believe although the literature suggests the profile is flat.

To set the record straight, it was showed as doing that very thing by Sanofi themselves, ie the manufacturers of Lantus, the first insulin glargine that came to the market who showed the peak at 4 to 5 hours on a neat little line graph originally, not just the likes of me who happened to use it.

I do agree though FWIW - we've never seen anything from anybody anywhere that has ever suggested that other makes of insulin glargine such as Semglee, do NOT have similar properties!