Best finger prick monitor?

[Aircastle]

I am prediabetic, recent HBA1cs 43 and 44 trying to control through testing (as well as diet, exercise etc). I bought a monitor, and then another to check against. However the second consistently reads about 20% higher than the first. so now I'm just confused. Can't find any NHS recommendation. What fingerprick monitor is considered to be most accurate?

 

[jpscloud]

Hello @Aircastle, welcome! I don't know which is considered the most accurate but I think none are really meant to be in the truest sense. I use mine for indicating trends and testing foods/seeing spikes, so I use one that works with an app to show me a graph and pie chart (I use Betachek C50 because I like the convenience of the cassettes, but there are much cheaper options with strips.

 

[In Response]

All finger prick meters sold in the UK must comply with the same accuracy standard.
This is within 15% of the "true" reading 95% of the time.

If one of your meters is 15% below and your other is 15% above, the higher one could be showing 20% higher than the other.

Do you need an accurate meter or do you need a meter to show what food and activities affect your BG?
If you need the latter, either of your meters is fine as long as you stick with one meter.

 

[catinahat]

Pick the one you prefer and put the other away as a spare.
As mentioned above our meters are not accurate, the only way to tell what your blood sugar level is down to decimal points, is to have a sample tested in a lab. Even then there would be some margin of error.
All we need to know is an idea of what range our levels are in.
Here's how we do it
Generally speaking someone with a normal response to blood sugar would see their levels return to around pre meal values within 2hrs
So we test just before eating and again 2hrs later. In a perfect world we would hope to see our 2hr result back to our pre meal level. But it's not a perfect world, our meters aren't perfect and we do have diabetes, which is why we allow ourselves a 2mmol buffer.
In other words, if your 2nd result is more than 2mmol above the 1st then there were probably too many carbohydrates in that meal for you.
Up to 2mmol and you can reasonably be sure that the carbs have been handled, of course it's possible that your 2nd result is back level to the 1st or even lower. That's when we are likely to do our happy dance because we have found a perfect meal.
So the actual numbers don't tell us much apart from a rough idea of our levels, but the difference between the pre and post tests give us a good idea of how our diet is affecting our blood sugar, and what changes we need to make to improve things.

 

[Aircastle]

Thanks for your replies. I thought that by taking an average you could get a general idea of what the HBA1c would be but that seems not to be possible. However if anyone from experience has a meter where they think the results more or less match the HBa1c results I would be glad to know which one.

 

[Omar51]

All finger prick meters sold in the UK must comply with the same accuracy standard.
This is within 15% of the "true" reading 95% of the time.

If one of your meters is 15% below and your other is 15% above, the higher one could be showing 20% higher than the other.

Do you need an accurate meter or do you need a meter to show what food and activities affect your BG?
If you need the latter, either of your meters is fine as long as you stick with one meter.

I don’t know which one, there are too many choices. Good ones and more close to accuracy are expensive. IMO good test strips are more important. I have had some bad experiences with cheap test strips made in China.
I have been using One Touch Verio test strips ( UK made) for over 13 years. I am happy with the results.

 

[catinahat]

where they think the results more or less match the HBa1c results

The two tests, finger prick and Hba1c are measuring different things.
The meters measure, admittedly not to a great degree of accuracy, actual blood sugar levels.
The Hba1c measures blood cell glycation, the higher our blood sugar is over the Lifetime of the blood cells the more glycated they become.
Blood cells usually hang around for about 12 weeks so the Hba1c is often described as an average of our last 12 weeks, but it's not a real average and it's not necessarily 12 weeks.
No one knows how long their blood cells live, 12 weeks is just an estimation, your cells could stick around for 13 or more weeks, mine could kick the bucket in 10 weeks.
That means that even if our Hba1c results were the same, my cells got to that level of glycation 3 weeks earlier than yours, Which means my true average blood sugar has been higher than yours, even though our Hba1c is the same
The Hba1c is a useful measure for diagnosis and to show if we're improving or not, but it's of limited use in day to day blood sugar management .