Toujeo is the new basal insulin from Sanofi. It’s not quite a replacement for Lantus as Sanofi will continue to sell Lantus. But, since a generic of Lantus will be coming on market later this year, it’s a new product for Sanofi that Lantus users might prefer.
My personal interest in switching from Lantus to Toujeo is it’s reported to last up to 36 hours. Lantus doesn’t make it the 24 for me. And it shows less nighttime hypoglycemia. Lantus typically drops me to 55 mg/dl around 5 AM most nights and then my blood sugar starts coming back up. Likely either my liver starts shooting sugar into my bloodstream to save me or the Dawn Effect begins, or both. But then by 6:30 or 7 AM my blood sugar is rising like a runaway train.
I’ve been using Toujeo since June 1, three weeks. From personal use I can also report the button is extremely easy to press. So if you’re a type 2 and take a lot of basal insulin, this will be much more comfortable injecting.
But I am absolutely crazed trying to figure out how much Toujeo I need along with my mealtime Humalog. When I take the same amount of Toujeo as I do Lantus, I seem to run high during the day. When I up the Toujeo by a unit, I drop overnight. And, every HCP will tell you not to change your dose for 3 days as your body has to get used to the change.
It is hair-pulling making this switch which I didn’t think would be difficult at all. I keep wondering how much longer to experiment. Granted, it’s not good to go hypo every night as I do with Lantus, but at least I knew my pattern, and I always came back up. Yes, I know, one day I might not. But now I’m having to figure out the impact of all the variables all over again: food, exercise, alcohol, weather, illness, stress, lag times.
I’m not giving up – yet. I more or less change one thing each day to see if it helps during my three day interval, and I’ve got two Toujeo pens left thanks to the largesse of my CDE friend who gave me samples.
So while improvements are always welcome, they’re not always easy.
Still using Toujeo but only because I got samples from a CDE. My health insurance doesn’t cover it yet. But I do prefer it to Lantus. It lasts longer and there seem to be less nighttime lows.
So did you end up staying with Toujeo or go back to lantus? My son is on his third day. No lows which is amazing, but he seems to need more, so we are going to up his dose. Also we have to be more careful with our bolus being right. Also he had a weird middle of the night spike we had to correct. But overall we like it better.
My experience was the same and I gave up on Toujeo: Highs over 350, lows under 60, my sliding scale was all wrong. Going form a well controlled diabetics on U100 basal insulin to an uncontrolled one with the U300 was not worth it.
Nan, you can’t take Toujeo out of the pen with a syringe. It’s formulated to be 3x stronger, so you can’t measure it unit for unit.
Why not try using a syringe to inject instead of a pen needle? Syringes have half-unit markings, so you can fine-tune the dose a bit more. I’m curious to try Toujeo, but I use Lantus twice a day. It sounds like it might be even trickier for me to make the switch.