Characteristics of glucose change in diabetes mellitus generalized through continuous wavelet transform processing: A preliminary study

BACKGROUND: The continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) system has become a popular evaluation tool for glucose fluctuation, providing a detailed description of glucose change patterns. We hypothesized that glucose fluctuations may contain specific information on differences in glucose change between type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), despite similarities in change patterns, because of different etiologies. Unlike Fourier transform, continuous wavelet transform (CWT) is able to simultaneously analyze the time and fre-quency domains of oscillating data. AIM: To investigate whether CWT can detect glucose fluctuations in T1DM. METHODS: The 60-d and 296-d glucose fluctuation data of patients with T1DM (n = 5) and T2DM (n = 25) were evaluated respectively. Glucose data obtained every 15 min for 356 d were analyzed. Data were assessed by CWT with Morlet form (n = 7) as the mother wavelet. This methodology was employed to search for limited frequency glucose fluctuation in the daily glucose change. The frequency and enclosed area (0.02625 scalogram value) of 18 emerged signals were compared. The specificity for T1DM was evaluated through multiple regression analysis using items that demonstrated significant differences between them as explanatory variables. RESULTS: The high frequency at midnight (median: 75 Hz, cycle time: 19 min) and middle frequency at noon (median: 45.5 Hz, cycle time: 32 min) were higher in T1DM vs T2DM (median: 73 and 44 Hz; P = 0.006 and 0.005, respectively). The area of the > 100 Hz zone at midnight to forenoon was more frequent and larger in T1DM vs T2DM. In a day, the lower frequency zone (15-35 Hz) was more frequent and the area was larger in T2DM than in T1DM. The three-dimensional scatter diagrams, which consist of the time of day, frequency, and area of each signal after CWT, revealed that high frequency signals belonging to T1DM at midnight had a loose distribution of wave cycles that were 17-24 min. Multivariate analysis revealed that the high frequency signal at midnight could characterize T1DM (odds ratio: 1.33, 95% confidence interval: 1.08-1.62; P = 0.006). CONCLUSION: CWT might be a novel tool for differentiate glucose fluctuation of each type of diabetes mellitus using CGM data.