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Diabetes Blood Glucose Home Testing

Sugar Plum

Sugar Plum

Member
Messages
8
Location
Bedfordshire
Type of diabetes
Type 2
Treatment type
Tablets (oral)
Dislikes
Too many to list.


  • Ryan T @RyanTSt Albans - 22m


    There are many blood glucose test meters on the market, I use a FineTest Lite meter.

    The readings are invariably in mmol/l, whereas the modern readings taken by UK medical authorities are in mmol/mol (HbA1c).
    For example, a meter reading of 6.5 equals an HbA1c reading of 40, in the good acceptable control range.

    To convert your meter readings into HbA1c simply use the following links, which you can save conveniently on you computer etc.

    diabeteschart.org/bgc10.html
    Also see -
    tinyurl.com/3kcxjcy4





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An hba1c and a blood glucose meter measure different things (hence the different units too). The former shows how much glycation (sugar damage) the red blood cells have had in their lives which average 12 weeks. The latter is the amount of glucose in your blood right now.

You can convert average blood glucose to an equivalent hba1c but that assumes consistent and comprehensive blood glucose readings that are truly representative of all your levels. So if you only test fasted first thing it’ll miss all your post meal higher levels and convert to a falsely low hba1c equivalent. Or if you only test after bigger higher carb meals it‘ll create a false high missing your more reasonable levels the rest of the day.
 
I much prefer to trust my glucose meter readings to give me an accurate indication as to how well I manage my glucose levels. I use a Contour Next which has an option to provide average figures based on my actual tests results over various periods of time up to 90 days, and if I wish I can use this figure to predict my HBA1c with the HbA1c/glucose levels converter on our main diabetes.co.uk website, here: https://www.diabetes.co.uk/hba1c-to-blood-sugar-level-converter.html

However when I could afford to do so , I found that wearing a Libre sensor gave me the most information as to what exactly was going on with my glucose levels 24/7. It measured interstitial fluid glucose levels, which actually gave lower figures than my meter but most importantly the trends and patterns I saw were the same with both.

HbA1c results, being based on an average over time,(currently 12 months for me) can't distinguish between erratic highs and lows or nice steady/stable figures, so could possibly be quite misleading.
 
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