Predicting and Preventing Nocturnal Hypoglycemia in Type 1 Diabetes Using Big Data Analytics and Decision Theoretic Analysis

Background: Despite new glucose sensing technologies, nocturnal hypoglycemia is still a problem for people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) as symptoms and sensor alarms may not be detected while sleeping. Accurately predicting nocturnal hypoglycemia before sleep may help minimize nighttime hypoglycemia. Methods: A support vector regression (SVR) model was trained to predict, before bedtime, the overnight minimum glucose and overnight nocturnal hypoglycemia for people with T1D. The algorithm was trained on continuous glucose measurements and insulin data collected from 124 people (22,804 valid nights of data) with T1D. The minimum glucose threshold for announcing nocturnal hypoglycemia risk was derived by applying a decision theoretic criterion to maximize expected net benefit. Accuracy was evaluated on a validation set from 10 people with T1D during a 4-week trial under free-living sensor-augmented insulin-pump therapy. The primary outcome measures were sensitivity and specificity of prediction, the correlation between predicted and actual minimum nocturnal glucose, and root-mean-square error. The impact of using the algorithm to prevent nocturnal hypoglycemia is shown in-silico. Results: The algorithm predicted 94.1% of nocturnal hypoglycemia events (<3.9 mmol/L, 95% confidence interval [CI], 71.3-99.9) with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.86 (95% CI, 0.75-0.98). Correlation between actual and predicted minimum glucose was high (R = 0.71, P < 0.001). In-silico simulations showed that the algorithm could reduce nocturnal hypoglycemia by 77.0% (P = 0.006) without impacting time in target range (3.9-10 mmol/L). Conclusion: An SVR model trained on a big data set and optimized using decision theoretic criterion can accurately predict at bedtime if overnight nocturnal hypoglycemia will occur and may help reduce nocturnal hypoglycemia.