I’m sure an experienced medic in an emergency could work with it somehow, but for the rest of us living in civilization, insulin that has been outside their recommended temperature range is very dangerous.
Long-acting insulin has crystals that dissolve at body temperature over time, hence it can gradually release insulin over hours. If you break or dissolve those crystals by freezing/thawing/overwarming, the best scenario would be that it became fast-acting insulin, and it would crash your glucose instantly on injection of your usual dose. The worst scenario is that it no longer acts like insulin.
Other way around. The removal of the prolonged release is what would kill you right away. Hypoglycaemia kills WAY faster than hyperglycaemia. Like - one takes minutes, the other one hours to days).
I’m sure an experienced medic in an emergency could work with it somehow, but for the rest of us living in civilization, insulin that has been outside their recommended temperature range is very dangerous.
Long-acting insulin has crystals that dissolve at body temperature over time, hence it can gradually release insulin over hours. If you break or dissolve those crystals by freezing/thawing/overwarming, the best scenario would be that it became fast-acting insulin, and it would crash your glucose instantly on injection of your usual dose. The worst scenario is that it no longer acts like insulin.
Other way around. The removal of the prolonged release is what would kill you right away. Hypoglycaemia kills WAY faster than hyperglycaemia. Like - one takes minutes, the other one hours to days).
I thought “crash your glucose instantly” would be understood as hypoglycemia, but English is not my native language.
I think they’re saying that your proposed best case causes possible instant death, whereas the proposed worst case would take days to kill you.