Background: The adoption of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) already helps to improve glycemic control in diabetes. When coupled with appropriate data analysis techniques, CGM also provides dependable estimates for significant metrics, like glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c). Findings from the REALISM-T1D study can boost HbA1c estimation methods in diabetes care and stimulate their use in clinical practice.
Methods: Continuous glucose monitoring data of 27 adults affected by type-1 diabetes were acquired by means of G6 (Dexcom, San Diego, CA) sensors for a time span of 120 days. Glycated hemoglobin laboratory assays were performed during the concluding follow-up visits. Data were then analyzed to derive estimates of assay results, taken as the gold standard.
Results: Bland-Altman (BA) plots show that smart interpolation to patch missing data and a wise choice of interstitial glucose (IG) weighting function, besides a proper mean interstitial glucose (MIG) to HbA1c regression equation, improve HbA1c estimation quality with respect to methods relying on MIG alone. A decrease in the BA plot-related variance of differences with respect to the gold standard confirms the improvement. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests on the bias-compensated mean squared error (MSE) with respect to conventional MIG-based methods show that the improvement is statistically significant with a confidence level better than 95% (P = .0179).
Conclusions: Improved HbA1c estimation methods result in better HbA1c prediction quality with respect to those based on MIG alone, thus providing quick, but still relatively accurate feedback to diabetologists. They alleviate the discordances reported in literature and, with further improvements, may become a viable complement/alternative to HbA1c assays.
Keywords: continuous glucose monitoring; glycated hemoglobin estimation; prediction models; real-life observation; type-1 diabetes.