Live data from Hacker News

FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels

fda.gov

161–170 of 255 posts

Re: FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the large studies are to be believed, you could save hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions in excess expenditure, because stable blood glucose shortens length of stay. People with diabetes alone account for 60% of hospital expenditure, so improving their care improves the system in a big way.

>People with diabetes alone account for 60% of hospital expenditure That number seemed too large to be true, and I think you might be conflating some numbers... The NIH study about Economic Costs of Diabetes in the US in 2022 [1] states: >For cost categories analyzed, care for people diagnosed with diabetes accounts for 1 in 4 health care dollars in the U.S., 61% of which are attributable to diabetes. So, 25% of heal…

Wild numbers. I already thought GLPs were huge but this makes me think it’s even larger.

Re: FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels

#162
post #101
post #88

Ketones are only going to be present if you are exceptionally bad (very high carb diet) or exceptionally good (very low carb diet) at managing your blood sugar. It's not going to be terribly useful for your average diabetic who has fairly good control over their blood sugars.

> your average diabetic who has fairly good control over their blood sugars I think it's huge for diabetics. It's a mental toll for them. They hate having to constantly prick themselves to take readings. It's awkward, inconvenient and you have to do it multiple times to be sure you got a good reading. And worse of all, it's possible to forget to take a reading when you need to.

Well I'm a T1D and I'm not generally worried about DKA because I wear a CGM and keep my blood glucose below 140 mg/dL

Re: FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels

#163
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m willing to bet we can see longevity improvements from better blood sugar control. Not 100% certain but extremely likely, this would include potential heart attack and dementia reduction…

This has been tested actually. A clinical trial looking at tight blood sugar regulation was aborted after it resulted in multiple cardiac events.

I'll be showing my bias here, but you're probably referring to NICE-SUGAR, which I think suffered mainly from having a pretty uninspired control algorithm. We built and simulated it and several other clinical protocols and it had the widest spread of performance, but it lost a ton of points to hypoglycemia performance, which is where you get into increasing mortality. The NICE-SUGAR protocol [1] has no notion of weight based dosing, and even has some completely missed edge cases. There have been similar studies in Japan with a better algorithm and they showed the expected benefits.

[1] - https://www.glycemiccontrol.net/NICE/StudyDesign/NiceALGORIT...

Re: FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels

#164
post #113

A friend died of diabetic ketoacidosis. He loved technology and seeing people succeed. Thinking of him with this news. Miss you Dan. Grateful we're moving forward on so many fronts in the world.

Out of curiosity, Type I or Type II diabetes, if you (or others) are aware?

Re: FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing just how much rice can impact your blood sugar is eye opening. Sticking to a "half the normal amount" of rice when eating Indian/Asian food can help a lot with blood sugar. And keeping blood sugar in check _seems_ to have a fair amount of researching backing up the idea that it's healthier and makes you feel better

Sure it impacts it. But what does that matter? Your body is very efficient as self regulating

> Your body is very efficient as self regulating

Yet the mind of most people is terrible at that, we love to overeat our body regulations.

Re: FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels

#166
I am a founder and researcher at https://replica.health and co-creator of https://metabo-net.org. This is super exciting and cant wait to see what we can learn once large datasets of overlapping ketones + glucose + insulin data become available.

One point I discussed with other researchers at ADA this year: in theory automated insulin delivery does not stand to benefit much from ketone sensors, since diabetic ketoacidosis will almost always be preceded by high blood glucose, which we already measure using the cgm. It will be interesting to see what this ketone data is actually used for.

Re: FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whether or not (say) that coffee you just drank took you out of the fasted state A cup of coffee has zero carbohydrates, trace lipids, and about half a gram of protein. That's not going to pull anyone out of a fasting state. Now, if you're talking about a cup of flavoured milk, that's a different question...

Adding any amount of milk to a coffee adds carbs. And a large number of people add _some_ amount of milk.

An 8oz serving of milk (236 ml) has 12 g of carbohydrate.

People tend to add single or double cream (1/2 & 1/2 or whipping / heavy cream, respectively, in the US) to coffee, both of which have less carbohydrate, and generally add a tablespoon or two (15--30 ml) per cup of coffee. The carbohydrate content is That's unlikely to bring someone out of a ketosis state, which requires a daily intake of < 15--30g. That's about two full cups (450 ml) of single cream.

Re: FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels

#168
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preventive medicine is a bit one. If your fitness watch could measure blood glucose, I think it would be a ton more impactful in terms of health outcomes.

In what way? Nondiabetic folks self regular glucose just fine on their own.

Diabetes (as with much else) is a continuum. Many people are prediabetic, or experience periods of high or low blood sugar.

There are also multiple types of diabetes, not just the generally-known Type I / II split, but gestational (affecting pregnant women), Type 5, malnutrition-related, and others. (See Wikipedia for a listing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes#Types>.)

Other factors can also influence blood sugars, including infections, physical activity, and stress.

Re: FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels

#170
post #7

Looked after my son who has T1D for now 5 years, checked keytones maybe 20 times. Compared to blood glucose which we check look at every 5 minutes. Maybe this is more for Type 2 or other diabetes, or for people prone to DKA. Or it is for people with a working pancreas who think looking at their blood sugars (and now keytones) tells them something like soothsayers reading tea leaves

Considering that DKA accounts for 160k hospital admissions a year, your lived experience translates poorly to such a flippant dismissal. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/about/diabetic-ketoacidosis.htm...

In diabetics, DKA is preceded by hyperglycemia. Meaning, a CGM would tell you earlier that you are at risk for DKA than a CKM, a CKM would only tell you after you got it. Hence grahar64 is absolutely correct that as far as we know now, this provides no benefit to people at risk of DKA that a CGM does not already provide. I'm sure there will be some benefits but its really not clear at this point.
Post reply on HN