Remember, Your Time in Range Isn’t a Grade Either

By Eliza Skoler

Time in Range (TIR) is another number for people with diabetes to pay attention to and use to improve their daily diabetes management. We talked with three women in the diabetes community about how they use TIR as a helpful number to keep them on track and inform their care.

Time in Range (TIR) is a helpful tool that captures the highs, lows, and in-range glucose values that characterize life with diabetes. TIR can help people understand how their daily habits and behaviors affect glucose levels, so they can use this information to feel better and reduce glucose swings. But it’s also another measurement to keep track of – and the goal is to look at it as a number and not have it loaded with emotion or negativity if it falls short of your goal.

For many people, it can be challenging to get past seeing glucose levels as “tests” and A1C checks as “grades.” But as Adam Brown explains, blood sugars are just numbers – they are neither good nor bad, but rather they are information that will help you make a decision about your diabetes. Click here to read about how Adam transformed how he views diabetes data. Seeing your A1C level as a grade can actually cause harm – some people are demotivated to take care of their diabetes when they feel they are frequently failing. Renza Scibilia and Chris Aldred write more about this in “What’s Your Grade?”

Enter Time in Range (TIR), the percentage of time that a person spends with their glucose levels in their target range. TIR is a powerful tool to assess patterns in glucose levels throughout the day and over time, and this can help inform lifestyle changes and treatment decisions in a way that A1C cannot. People with diabetes should aim to spend as much time in their target range as possible.

With the TIR number comes the risk that people may see it as yet another test of their diabetes management. It might be another mark that tells them they are not measuring up.

“When I read about Time in Range, it was a bit scary at first, simply because it seemed like it was a ‘grade,’ like you would get in school, so I didn’t want to think of it too much because my own fear of failure is high,” said Sarah Knotts who has lived with type 1 diabetes for 32 years. She has two young children and works with mySugr as the US Head of Customer Support.

Stacey Simms agreed. Simms is the host of Diabetes Connections and author of The World's Worst Diabetes Mom: Real Life Stories of Parenting a Child with Type 1 Diabetes. Her son Benny was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2006, right before he turned two.

“It’s easy to look at TIR and other diabetes markers as a judgment on your value as a person. I think there’s a bit of a danger in looking at these markers as anything but math and management tools” she told us. “Less TIR doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or worth less than a person with more TIR. I don’t know how we can keep these tools from weighing on the mental burden of diabetes, but I do think being aware they can have this effect is a good first step.”

Knotts now uses TIR regularly. “My biggest hurdle to get past was that I equated TIR to being a grade – as if I was turning in a term paper or project and those percentages related to a letter grade,” she said. “Just as your A1C is not an accurate picture of your control, a TIR is also not a complete picture either. Yes, I have a range that I want my TIR to be, but I’m not focusing on one average number, or one A1C target. I’ve been able to learn that if I can keep my numbers close to the target range, everything else (A1C, standard deviation) tends to also be better, and I feel better overall.”

Christel Oerum, who was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of 19 and created Diabetes Strong with her husband in 2015, thinks about TIR both every day and in a long-term sense.

“I use TIR daily in the sense that I aim for glucose levels in my target range (70-160 mg/dL, but I don’t focus on always meeting a daily TIR goal, as I think that’s too stressful and not realistic,” she said. “There are going to be days where I’m in range most of the day and days where I’m not, and for me, that’s okay. I do have a monthly TIR goal that I’d like to see myself hit, but that’s more of a retrospective analysis.”

Oerum acknowledged how easy it is to get obsessed with making TIR goals. “For me, that’s not healthy, which is why I try to not use TIR as a daily goal but rather as an overall indicator of whether I should make changes to my care,” she said. “TIR is not a grade or score. It’s a tool to help you manage your diabetes to the best of your ability.”

Simms’ family focuses less on the actual numbers (like TIR and A1C) and more on helping Benny thrive with diabetes: “I spend a lot less time working on TIR than on things like fostering independence, teaching Benny to trouble shoot and helping him advocate for himself. TIR is a great tool to check on for trends and adjustments, but we don’t use it very often. I wouldn’t want Benny checking TIR every day or even more than once a week unless he was really tweaking settings or trying something new.”

We don’t want TIR to be scary or intimidating. At diaTribe, our hope is that more and more people will be able to use TIR in a non-judgmental and informative way, helping themselves and their families lead healthier lives. Oerum summed it up well. “TIR for me means more details on how my management is going and can help me hone in on what to change and what to leave alone. Diabetes can’t be about perfection, and just as my A1C isn’t a grade of my effort, neither is my TIR.”

This article is part of a series on time in range. 
 
The diaTribe Foundation, in concert with the Time in Range Coalition, is committed to helping people with diabetes and their caregivers understand time in range to maximize patients' health. Learn more about the Time in Range Coalition here.