Background and objective: In type 1 diabetes (T1D), a quantitative evaluation of the impact on hypoglycemia of suboptimal therapeutic decision (e.g. incorrect estimation of the ingested carbohydrates, inaccurate insulin timing, etc) is unavailable. Clinical trials to measure sensitivity to patient actions would be expensive, exposed to confounding factors and risky for the participants. In this work, a T1D patient decision simulator (T1D-PDS), realistically reproducing blood glucose dynamics in a large virtual population, is used to perform extensive in-silico trials and the so-derived data employed to implement a sensitivity analysis that ranks different behavioral factors based on their impact on a clinically meaningful parameter, the time below range (TBR).
Methods: Eleven behavioral factors impacting on hypoglycemia are considered. The T1D-PDS was used to perform multiple 2-week simulations involving 100 adults, by testing about 3500 different perturbations for nominal behavior. A local linear approximation of the function linking the TBR and the factors were computed to derive sensitivity indices (SIs), quantifying the impact of each factor on TBR variations.
Results: The obtained ranking quantifies importance of factors w.r.t. the others. Factors apparently related to hypoglycemia were correctly placed on the top of the ranking, including systematic (SI=2.05%) and random (SI=1.35%) carb-counting error, hypotreatment dose (SI=-1.21%), insulin bolus time w.r.t. mealtime (SI=1.09%).
Conclusions: The obtained SIs allowed to rank behavioral factors based on their impact on TBR. The behavioral factors identified as most influential can be prioritized in patient training.
Keywords: Hypoglycemia; In-silico trials; Multiple linear regression; Patient behavior; Sensitivity analysis; Type 1 diabetes.
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