WEEKLY INSULIN

Are you ready with answers for your patients?

Click here for previous newsletters.

1. Counselling Conundrum: a real question from a patient

2. Concise Conclusion: a straight-forward patient-friendly answer 

3. Quick Wrap-up 

Clearly, there are nuances that may not be captured in this format. The goal here is to provide you with helpful counselling tips which often draw from multiple sources or those which are not commonly accessed by busy healthcare providers serving the community.

Counselling Conundrum: "My Nurse gave me samples of this new weekly insulin, and suggested that I ask my pharmacist how I should convert from my Basaglar. I am worried about going too low. Should I be injecting the same units?

Concise Conclusion: You multiply your daily units of Basaglar by 7 to give you your once weekly dose. Keep in mind, you'll be adjusting at weekly intervals and usually by 20 units, and you should start the day after your last dose of Basaglar.

Quick Wrap-up: This is a game changer for patients on daily basal insulin (7 injections down to 1 per week). This isn't meant as an alternative to mealtime insulin and therefore the rapid acting insulin dosage should not be included in calculating the new weekly dose. Keep in mind that it can also be started at 10.5 times daily basal insulin units if patients are considered low risk for hypos, then the next week go back down to 7 times the dose and titrate weekly usually by 20 units. Make sure to let them know to prime with 10 units (instead of 2 with most other insulins) before each injection.

Dive Deeper

1) Insulin Icodec Weekly: A Basal Insulin Analogue for Type 2 Diabetes - PubMed (nih.gov)

We hope you have found this useful. A reply to this email with any feedback or topic suggestion you may have would be greatly appreciated. Your input will be the key to making this newsletter the best it can be.