Anna has finished one month (36 days technically) on Control-IQ.
She has pretty much operated on sleep mode 24-7 because we have a good idea of her settings from years of Loop experience and observation/testing of settings, therefore didn’t believe the tighter range would yield an increase in potential for low BG issues. If we hadn’t had a good grasp on settings going into Control-IQ, I would’ve opted for the normal target range (112.5-160 mg/dL).
Nothing in life had changed that much between the month on Loop vs the month on Control-IQ…same school schedule, same weekends. Health was the same between the two months.
As you can see, the results are pretty similar between the two. The average BG on both systems was just about 112 mg/dL…but Anna’s correction targets while using Loop were 95-100 mg/dL. So even though we used lower targets in settings, we didn’t achieve any better BG average on Loop as a result.
My biggest take aways in terms of experience has been noticing the standard deviation drop (39 vs 33 mg/dL). If you aren’t familiar with standard deviation, it’s a measure of the variability in your data set. The larger your standard deviation, the more spread there is in your data. So a lower standard deviation means more of your data is closer to the average…aka a smoother ride of BGs. We’ve had a decent increase in time in range as a result.
The second take away was the decrease in low percentages, in particular overnight lows. We have pretty much eliminated the pesky lows from situations where we accidentally had slightly too high of scheduled basals. I’m not advocating intentionally setting basals too high on Control-IQ, but rather remarking on Control-IQ’s ability to compensate more effectively than Loop did for us when this situation happens (that’s life with the human body after all, it happens). On both systems, the low percentage is artificially higher than we truly experience due to the first 4-6 hours of new sensor sessions. We get an awfully lot of false lows during brand new sensors…so every 10 days we usually add to our low percentage without really being low.
I hope this helps answer some questions for Loop users about how Control-IQ might measure up against Loop. In our experience, you can get pretty similar end results between the two.