Insulin Titration Guidelines for Patients With Type 1 Diabetes: It Is About Time!

Abstract

A proposal that an Insulin Advisory Committee develop insulin titration guidelines 100 years after its discovery. Glucose control metrics remain poor despite significant advances in diabetes technology. A century after the introduction of insulin, health care providers and patients with type 1 diabetes have worldwide access to a variety of insulin delivery devices (IDDs), glucose monitors, bolus calculators (BCs), continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), and automated insulin delivery (AID) systems. However, these advances have not enabled most patients to achieve today's clear A1c and time-in-range goals. Much of this failure arises from the lack of clear insulin titration guidelines for determining appropriate insulin doses. The lack of dosing clarity results in local physicians, clinics, and individual patients managing insulin titrations as they see fit, creating significant inefficiencies for reaching recommended glycemic goals. This review (1) details the widespread problems generated by nonphysiological dose settings in today's BCs, insulin pumps, and AID systems; (2) presents a method to develop and implement optimized total daily doses of insulin to correct the most common problem of hyperglycemia; (3) discusses using large device databases to provide clear insulin titration guidelines that optimize BC settings from an optimized total daily dose (TDD) of insulin for patients with T1D; and (4) recommends the formation of an Insulin Advisory Committee to clarify the steps to take toward universal insulin titration guidelines, optimized BC settings, and a systematic logic for their use in insulin delivery devices.