Pediatrics—the driving factor for technological advancements in diabetology

Diabetes technologies are being continuously developed and are quickly finding their way into everyday life, both in clinical trials and in therapeutic applications, due to the large proportion of patients with type 1 diabetes in pediatrics. As an omnipresent innovation in therapy, intermittently scanned glucose levels, which are increasingly becoming the standard method for determining glucose, are an increasingly effective instrument. Also, the predictive suspension of insulin pumps, which has been used in Germany for many years, delivers meanwhile long-term data on safety and effectiveness, for systems from numerous manufacturers. The further development of hybrid closed-loop systems is the subject of various research groups. Even if many systems show success in the application, so far only one system has entered the market, albeit unfortunately not in the German market yet. Thus, this leads more and more to the use of freely available systems, where the hardware itself has to be modified. Well-informed patients are aware of the effectiveness and also the risk of using non-standardized systems because the “conventional” pathway seems too slow to them. However, preliminary clinical trials show a verifiable effectiveness of these systems.