Painless Insulin Delivery: The Future of Diabetes Care with Needle-Free Injections (2023)

Those who are dependent on daily insulin know how inconvenient it can be. You feel stuck with daily injections and uncomfortable needle pricks. You probably even wish there was a magical solution to transfer insulin from the vial into your body without that needle.

Well, with technology, all dreams are coming true. Let’s discuss the future of diabetes care with needle-free insulin delivery and how patients with needle phobia can benefit from it.

Without dwelling deeply on statistics, diabetes is one of the most common diseases known to mankind. Its prevalence has increased even more lately because of the abundance of hyper-palatable, convenient, yet unhealthy food in grocery stores and fast food restaurants.

Diabetes occurs for two reasons: the body is unable to produce insulin from the pancreas, rendering the blood sugar high most of the time. This is known as Diabetes type 1.

In type 2, the insulin is there, but the body cannot utilize it because it lacks sensitivity to it.

Type 2 is a lot more common than type 1, and is often managed by controlling the diet. Type 1, although less common, is trickier to handle because it’s insulin-dependent.

The patients must take daily insulin to check their blood glucose levels. The insulin is often administered through needle injections or pens, and the amount of times the insulin is used every day depends on the type of insulin the patient takes.

Despite being a necessity, there is no question that injecting yourself with a needle or a conventional insulin pen every day for the rest of your life is an endless inconvenience, to say the least.

Here’s why using conventional insulin delivery methods can be a hassle for patients:

Whether you endure it or pretend it doesn’t exist, the needle injection will cause some pain. Yes, you’ll get used to the pain at one point, but it’s still pain.

That’s not even mentioning those who have a needle phobia. Those people find taking their insulin an absolute struggle, and might even cope with their fear in an unhealthy manner, skipping meals to avoid taking insulin or not adhering to their treatment regimen.

Insulin should be injected beyond the cutaneous level of the skin and before reaching the muscles. That’s to ensure ideal absorption and early postprandial glucose control.

All insulin needles are short enough to prevent you from injecting too deep. However, sometimes you might find yourself stuck with a longer needle. That’s when injecting at the right depth becomes a lot more challenging.

If you inject too deep, you’ll administer the insulin into the muscles, making the injection much more painful.

Aside from the discomfort, insulin injected into a muscle is absorbed a lot faster than it should be, and its effect doesn’t last as long as it needs to.

Infection risks are fairly low when you’re using new, clean needles. Even if the needle isn’t that clean, the amount of bacteria you’d administer from one faulty injection can be negligible.

However, multiple careless injections with unclean needles or without cleaning the injection site can cause skin-level infections that might end up more dangerous than they need to be.

All insulin needles are disposable, so you can only use them once before throwing them away.

That means taking special precautions and using safety boxes, which isn’t something that everyone does. 

The final result? 

Thousands of needles get dumped in regular trash bags, becoming a source of infection and polluting the environment.

Needle-free injections are slowly making their way into the treatment regime of diabetes, offering a list of advantages over the constant needle pricks.

There are a few needle-free injectors, but the best are jet injectors.

A needle-free jet injection creates a high-pressure liquid stream that can penetrate the skin without using needles.

This is achieved when the liquid is forced through the nozzle into a thin stream that can painlessly penetrate the skin without using a needle.

The depth of the solution penetration can be controlled by adjusting the pressure and volume of the liquid, which is something you don’t have to worry about in the latest needle-free insulin injector; the InsuJet ™ V5 .

All the adjustments are automated, and all you have to do is press the injector against your skin for an instantaneous, painless injection.

Although not prevalent yet, needle-free insulin injections are slowly on their way to becoming the primary insulin treatment method.

They offer a variety of advantages over the conventional needle administration methods. These include:

The first and most important advantage of needle-free injection is the absence of pain. Because there’s no needle in the injection nozzle, the insulin jet injector is virtually pain-free.

Instead of the usual needle prick, what the patient feels is a slight pressure on the skin followed by a small tickle or pinch-like feeling.

Further, the absence of needles is a sure treatment for those who have needle phobia.

Unless you’re using an insulin pen, regular insulin injections often require you to manually withdraw insulin from a vial. This might lead you to aspirate an extra or an insufficient amount of insulin by accident.

The highly advanced needle-free InsuJet allows you to withdraw insulin with a much better accuracy. The numerical display system paired with the smart insulin aspiration allows you to withdraw the exact amount you need

Remember the accidental muscle injection we talked about earlier? This problem is theoretically non-existent here. The InsuJet is designed to inject the insulin exactly in the fatty layer between the skin and the underlying muscles.

The majority of needle-associated infections indeed happen in hospitals and clinics where diseases are often present.

However, that doesn’t rule out the probability of the transmission of bloodborne diseases at home. Needle-free injections eliminate such a possibility entirely.

Needle-free insulin therapy isn’t just effective in controlling blood sugar and allows for smaller doses because of how well-absorbed the injected insulin is.

A randomized clinical trial in 2020 compared the effect of insulin pens compared to needle-free insulin injectors on 427 patients.

The study concluded that insulin jet injectors aren’t inferior to their needle-utilizing peers while controlling plasma glucose. If anything, they provide better patient satisfaction than needle-based injections.

The overall usage of an InsuJet injector revolves around the same concept as an insulin needle. You’ll start by aspirating the insulin and then injecting it into your body. However, there are mandatory differences during the steps.

The V5 injector can aspirate insulin from 3mL and 10mL vials. It does so by having two adaptors tailor-made for each of them.

You can attach the 10mL adaptor to the corresponding vial immediately. However, the same can’t be said for the 3mL adaptor, as you’ll need a cartridge to support the smaller vials, which comes with your purchase.

With the insulin vial attached to your adaptor, it’s time to plug that adaptor into your InsuJet. Assuming you already have the nozzle attached, simply insert the adaptor onto it and keep rotating clockwise until it can no longer rotate.

If you don’t have the nozzle attached, you must install it first. Turn the nozzle lock into the unlocked position, insert the nozzle and push it down until you hear a click, then rotate the nozzle lock to the locked position.

This step is equivalent to pushing your syringe down before you start pulling it again to aspirate a solution.

What you need to do here is to rotate the InsuJet to the negative direction (towards 0) and go beyond that until you see a green label. That’s when your InsuJet is ready to aspirate your insulin.

This step highlights one of the advantages the InsuJet has over conventional needle injections. You will no longer have to focus too much on that extra-small gauge on the needle to ensure that you have the correct dosage.

The InsuJet has a scale from 0-10 to determine, in units, how much insulin the InsuJet will aspirate. Simply rotate the InsuJet in the positive direction according to the number of units needed for your dose.

For example, if your dose is four units, then you should rotate the lower end of the device until you see the number four. However, because of the probability of air bubbles, aspirating two additional units is recommended so you can have some insulin to spare while getting rid of those bubbles.

Once you finish aspirating the insulin, rotate the back end of the device to the negative direction once more to ensure the absence of air bubbles. Once you settle back to your actual dose (four in our example) it’s time to administer the insulin.

Insert the InsuJet’s comfort ring, which makes the device’s pressure on your body more gentle, then align the InsuJet 90° on your injection site.

Press hard on the lower side of the InsuJet and wait for five seconds to ensure the dose has been administered correctly.

Have a look at this video to understand everything you need to know about the latest InsuJetTM V5.0 Injector.

With proper maintenance and care, you can use the InsuJet for multiple daily injections for up to 3 years or 5,000 times before you need a replacement.

Using the InsuJet, you can administer:

• Regular human insulin
• Animal insulin
• Basal Insulin
• Rapid-acting insulin
• Intermediate and long-acting Insulin

Just make sure they’re all in 100 unit concentrations.

In most cases, as long as your doctor doesn’t have a valid reason to stop you from doing so, you can easily change from your previous insulin administration method to using the InsuJet.

Painless insulin delivery is slowly becoming the future of diabetes care, especially for patients who must rely on daily insulin doses for the rest of their lives.

The daily needle injections are instantly replaced by a needle-free method of administration that’s not only more convenient for you but it also reduces the chances of infection and ensures ideal delivery of the insulin.

You’ll no longer aspirate more or less insulin than you need by accident and should no longer worry about safely disposing of needles.

Needle-free InsuJet jet injectors are the future. There’s no better time to upgrade your insulin therapy than now.