Doing a little speculative Googling earlier on to try to find out a little more about my Humulin-I (Isophane) insulin, I happened across a few interesting articles i found helpful.
Here's the article I started with, on the general effects of smoking and also the more specific effects in diabetics.
http://www.diabetes.ca/Section_About/smoking.asp
Among other things it said that smoking inhibits the body's ability to absorb insulin efficiently. Following on from the recent "Consistently high in the morning" thread, I wondered if the fact that I seem to smoke more later in the evening, and during my late-night interneting than at any other time, was contributing to my general high BG in the morning. More importantly, to what extent this effect actually was.
http://www.d4pro.com/IDM/site/chronic.htm
This was a small study with only a few test subjects and the style is a bit technical, but it's punctuated with little "moments of clarity". Figure 2, for example suggests that there is a direct and frighteningly significant correlation between the number of cigarettes I smoke and the degree of insulin-resistance I'll experience. I would be interested to know about any other reliable sources of info people can recommend on this.
Another thing I found interesting was the fact that there's evidence to suggest that insulin resistance was exhibited to a certain degree in non-diabetic chronic smokers as well - I haven't seen any article that directly accuses smoking of being a contributing factor to the onset of diabetes, but I'm a "where there's smoke, there's fire" kind of man.
Things I'm taking from this so far:
1) Long-term smoking to any great degree can significantly degrade my body's ability to absorb insulin in general.
2) Periods of heavy-smoking can have a directly proportional effect on my insulin uptake, so if a smoke a lot one night say, I can expect that less insulin will have been absorbed and so my BG will probably be higher than my dosages expected effect. This is probably a major reason (perhaps among others) why I've had so much variance in my Basal night insulin effect.
3) When I next try to quit smoking, I will have to take into account that my insulin dosage may have to be reduced to take account of any observed improvement in my insulin absorbtion rate - presumably this would mean that my Basal ratio will change slightly?
I'm thinking out loud, so sorry for the ramble. I guess I'm just wondering if anyone else on here smokes, perhaps wrestling with trying to quit, or having problems with "dawn phenomena" that could perhaps be down to evening/night-time smoking. Anyone covered this with a doc recently?
sc0.
