How long do you wear or lasts one Dexcom G5 sensor?

As the title says. I am wondering how long people use their sensors with restarts? What sites? Any issues as results being far apart at calibration and such?

21 days 5 hours on upper arm.
5 hours after 3rd “restart” “questionmarks” popped up and I removed the sensor
Calibration: 2.6 per day
After “start” and subsequent “restart” and “warm-up” sensor was off by 10-15 units at each calibration for the first 24 hours. After that, day 2-7, it usually was between 3-8 units off. Always showing lower in Dexcom app on iOS device than control BGM (Omnipod PDM).

Ours average about 14 days.

For me it’s typically 12 to 16 days.

Any difference with how long they last with location of sensor?

Usually they last around 21 days on my abdomen. Typical Range is probably 18 to 24 days.

I use SkinTac when I put them on and run them until they start to peel off.

I cannot recall removing one due to it not being accurate.

Current sensor has been on 16 day 5 hours. It is very accurate today and not peeling off yet so there is still life in it.

Different locations on my body take longer to dial in the sensor for accuracy than others. My abdomen is the least accurate and takes 4-5 days to become remotely accurate. My back takes one day to dial in. When I restart them, the second session dials in much faster since the probe is adequately “soaked” IMO. Longest I go is 14 days in one spot just to give my sensitive skin a chance to recover.

We can always get 14 days, that is completely easy and normal for us on the back of the arms. 21 days happens pretty routinely, although data for us in the third week has a higher than normal dispersion i.e. it goes from a line to a little cloud of measurements.

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@Chris - Ditto on all points!!

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i’m curious to know about dexcoms accuracy. how long does it take before it becomes accurate from the time of the sensor session? the last one i test-drove (endo’s model G5), it took 3 days before i got accurate readings. after that it stayed accurate through the 10th day (one restart). i did wear it in the pool, 2 hours a day, 4 days a week, though; dont know if that should matter.

i wore it on the back of my upper arm.i have nowhere fleshy enough to put it on my tummy, otherwise that would deff use that location. also, if i slept on top of it by mistake, it would set off the LOW alarms all night long.

so my question here is about accuracy. i am also curious about how that would pertain to the direction arrows.

DM, in our son the sensors are accurate for us about 4 hours after inserting. We get 2-3 weeks out of each sensor.

OMG! you are so fortunate. well, really its your son who’s so fortunate. wow. does he wear a pump as well?

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I occasionally get strange "off’ readings where it jumps 20+ points from one reading in 5 minutes to the next with the arrow pointing straight up and than slowly creeps back to normal readings within 6-8 readings (30-40 minutes). 90% of those are trending up while I have the tendency to believe from my experience “to smell my glucose level” that the Dexcom G5 shows generally lower than the actual glucose level. Anyhow, I believe that this might have something to do either with body temperature or a hot shower since I usually notice it after a work-out or shower?
Otherwise it seems fairly accurate after the first 24 hours of calibrating but I would not treat a low or high without double-checking, especially if I do not have any other symptoms. Obviously we might all have the tendency to treat low warnings more vigilant than high warnings but that is when you have to know how you can trust your own warning signs.
I just look at it as a training tool that you can use to fine-tune your results. But of course, as so much other technology, it becomes quickly extremely addictive and because of that I am a bit worried that I could loose my own feel for my glucose reading as I tried to describe “that I smell my glucose level”

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Yes, he uses the Tandem pump. A really nice combination.

We used to get 12-14 days all the time. But the past school year, we have gotten about 8-9 days from many sensors, and 2-3 days from quite a few (early death), so our average these days is below a week.

Our lack of duration these days appears due to lean body type.

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this is exactly the problem that i had with my dexcom. i am very very lean and had little to no body fat to adhere it to. i rarely got accurate readings and often would hit capillaries or even nerves upon insertion. i was constantly calling dexcom for replacements. finally i decided to go back to finger sticks.

now that Medicare is paying 100% for the dexcom i thought i had nothing to lose in trying out again. we’ll see what happens.

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Lately I’ve been icing the area before sterilizing and insertion bc I hit three capillaries in a row w Dexcoms last month.

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I find the more stable my blood sugar, the longer the sensors lasts. Thus, when I’m eating low-carb and have relatively stable blood sugars with few rapid rises or falls, I get an average of a month per sensor. When I’m eating a higher-carb diet and my blood sugar is rising and falling repeatedly throughout the day, I get 14-16 days typically.

I only use my Dexcom on my stomach. I’ve used it twice on my arm, but it’s more difficult to insert alone, is at much higher risk of being pulled off, and is much harder to re-tape as needed. So I much prefer my stomach where I know sensors will be safe, since I pay for CGM entirely out of pocket.

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That is an interesting observation. I personally have not made that connection, but can make the case for it. i.e. the active part of the sensor is an enzyme (Glucose Oxidase) and after enough cycles (Oxidation/Reduction) the enzyme can become inactive, I will try and correlate the lifetimes with the average blood sugar in our history.

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I find it’s not so much average as standard deviation. It’s more the constant ups and downs that seem to kill it early.

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Ok, in that case I will go with the number of times we reached a benchmark and dropped back to baseline, and see if that has any discernible affect on the lifetimes over the last year or so.