Advantages and Disadvantages of Intensive/flexible Insulin Therapy
The two primary advantages of intensive/flexible therapy over more traditional two or three injection regimens are:
- greater flexibility of meal times, carbohydrate quantities, and physical activities, and
- better glycemic control to reduce the incidence and severity of the complications of diabetes.
Major disadvantages of intensive/flexible therapy are that it requires greater amounts of education and effort to achieve the goals, and it substantially increases the daily cost of diabetes care.
It is a common misconception that more frequent hypoglycemia is a disadvantage of intensive/flexible regimens. The frequency of hypoglycemia increases with increasing effort to achieve normal blood glucoses with any insulin regimen. When traditional regimens are used aggressively enough to achieve near-normal glycosylated hemoglobin A1c levels, hypoglycemia is at least as frequent as with flexible regimens. When used correctly, flexible regimens offer greater ability to achieve good glycemic control with easier accommodation to variations of eating and physical activity.
Read more about this topic: Intensive Insulinotherapy
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