Monitor Trial Spotlighted in Prominent Blog

The New York Times’s blog The Upshot has featured the PCORI-funded Monitor Trial in a piece highlighting the study's finding that routine glucose monitoring may be unnecessary for people with type 2 diabetes who are not on insulin. 

The Upshot post is just the latest in a long line of media coverage and other outside attention for this study, which addresses an important question about care: how much does self-monitoring benefit these patients? The questions of how much and how often were the focus of a session at last year’s PCORI Annual Meeting, What to Do When One Treatment Approach Isn’t Better Than Another.

This PCORI-funded project aimed to determine whether daily self-monitoring of blood sugar levels improves blood sugar control and quality of life for patients with type 2 diabetes who do not use insulin.

The session featured the Monitor Trial’s principal investigator, Katrina Donahue of the University of North Carolina, talking about the study’s results. It was moderated by The Upshot blog post’s author, Aaron Carroll, a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine, who was also featured in an interview on Periscope at the Annual Meeting.

PCORI is dedicated to not only funding studies that foster more informed decision making, but also to ensuring that useful results are more quickly and widely disseminated. To that end, Donahue received a second PCORI-funded award in 2018 for a project dubbed Rethink the Strip that is promoting the spread and uptake of the study’s results into clinical practice. The Monitor Trial’s findings also led to a continuing medical education opportunity available through PRIME Education.