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Should People Without Diabetes Use a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM)?

A CGM is a small device that sticks to the body and measures the glucose levels in the interstitial fluid between your cells just below your skin, 24 hours per day, with a Bluetooth transmitter sending the data to your smartphone or a receiver. This sensor gives a complete picture of your blood sugar changes and patterns, sending data every 5 to 15 minutes, and users can easily see the effect of their food and exercise choices. Once only available with a prescription, CGMs are more accessible than ever now that the two leading manufacturers have released over-the-counter versions of their sensors.
“There are some people for whom seeing how the numbers change is a transformative experience,” says Jay Lusk, MD, a preventive medicine expert at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill. “They make a connection between their behaviors and this biomarker, and it changes everything for them.” He says that the unique benefit of CGMs is that they can “help patients take more agency over their health.”
Diana Isaacs, PharmD, CDCES, the director of education and training in diabetes technology at the Cleveland Clinic Endocrinology and Metabolism Institute, agrees. “It’s a lot different when I say to someone, ‘Hey, did you know that cereal can spike your glucose, and if you tried to eat a hard-boiled egg, it won’t spike your glucose as much?’ But there is something about experiencing that yourself that says, ‘Oh, I get that now, I am going to make a change.’”
This blood sugar feedback is considered extremely valuable for the optimal management of diabetes. It seems logical that the same kind of feedback could help people without diabetes keep their blood sugar under control, which could delay or reverse the progression of conditions like insulin resistance, prediabetes, and type 2 diabetes.
But so far, there is little data proving that it leads to improved health outcomes in people without diabetes. “There’s some theoretical promise there,” says Dr. Lusk, “but the data is very much still out on that question.”