Continuous glucose monitoring has long been associated with tight glycemic control in type 1 diabetes, but its role in type 2 disease — which affects roughly 90% of the 537 million people living with diabetes worldwide — has been less settled. A comprehensive review now consolidates five years of evidence suggesting CGM is not merely a convenience tool for insulin-dependent patients, but a clinically meaningful and economically justified intervention across the full spectrum of type 2 diabetes management.
The review, drawing on studies published between 2020 and 2025, finds that CGM use in adults with type 2 diabetes is consistently linked to reductions in glycosylated hemoglobin and improvements in time-in-range metrics — both predictors of long-term complications including nephropathy, retinopathy, and cardiovascular disease. Critically, these benefits were observed across insulin and non-insulin treatment regimens, undermining the common clinical assumption that CGM primarily benefits those on intensive insulin therapy. Emerging observational data point further toward reductions in all-cause mortality and acute healthcare utilization, while cost-effectiveness analyses across multiple payer structures characterize CGM as a high-value intervention.
These findings sit within a rapidly maturing evidence base that is steadily elevating CGM from specialist tool to primary care staple. Yet the review exposes a significant structural problem: uptake is uneven along racial, ethnic, age, and insurance lines, with safety-net populations — those arguably most likely to benefit from real-time glycemic feedback — least likely to access it. The advent of over-the-counter CGM devices could partially disrupt this disparity, though whether patients without clinical support can translate raw glucose data into behavior change remains unproven. This is a confirmatory and clinically important synthesis, though its observational underpinning means causal claims about mortality reduction should be treated cautiously pending randomized evidence.