I have just returned from two days of meetings for the HypoRESOLVE project for which I am a member of the Patient Advisory Committee (PAC). Read more about this project here (and watch the short video at the end of today’s post).

This is a huge project. Sometimes its scope hurts my little brain, but at the same time I love some of the almost audacious objectives and goals that have been set.

I left the two days of meetings with a similar feeling that I’ve felt after the previous meetings. And that is just how little we know and understand about hypoglycaemia.

This is one of the challenges when trying to define exactly what hypo is. Putting rings around something that is so personal, so diverse, so complex and so difficult to define for different people with diabetes is almost impossible. Our current classifications seem clunky at best; dismissive at worst.

I am one person with diabetes, but my own experiences of lows is inconsistent. I used to have lows that lasted for hours and hours and hours. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they were the times I clocked the lowest reading on my CGM or BG meter. Those numbers could have just been sitting at or around the low threes for those couple of hours, not trending up – no matter how much glucose I inhaled – but, thankfully, not trending downwards either.

And then there are the lows that would send me into full overdrive of shaking and sweating and a pounding heartrate, but there may not have been consistency with the number. I could have felt like that at 3.3mmol/l or when my meter was not registering a number other than LOW.

I understand that classifications use numbers because when glucose hits certain levels, we can measure things such as cognitive impact or physiological responses. But numbers when it comes to hypoglycaemia – and all aspects of diabetes – are only a small part of the picture.

Sometimes I feel that the more I learn about diabetes, the less I know. And I have also come to learn that the allocation of numbers is sometimes almost arbitrary. They may make sense to researchers or regulators. But the reality is very, very different.

The problem with this is that there is no way ever that diabetes is going to be able to be classified by fixed numbers. There needs to be wriggle room and agility in interpretation.

I love that HypoResolve is trying to come up with innovative ways to satisfy all groups. Regulators need clear definitions to use as guides when considering new and different therapies. Clinicians and researchers need thresholds to point to. And people with diabetes? Well, we need to understand those definitions and the apply them to our own particular brand of diabetes…and how it may shift and change over time.

And that’s where the PAC comes in. Our role is to make sure the real life perspective is front of mind all the time, and to remind everyone else on the project that there is nothing static or simple about living with hypoglycaemia.