Do a few decimals matter?

[Hummingbird Man]

Hello all, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes two weeks ago. This may have been caused by the steroids (prednisolone) which I have been on for six months and are now gradually decreasing. Over the last two weeks I have cut out all sugary foods and reduced my carbohydrate intake significantly. I have also been walking very briskly about 2 miles a day, most days. My finger prick test readings are mostly hovering around the "normal" levels but are sometimes about 0.5 above. For example I have just measured 8.2 , two hours after eating and I think this should be below 7.8 to be normal. Do I need to worry about a few tenths like this? I am naturally hoping I can control this by diet and exercise for the next 6 months by which time I should be off the steroids. Any comments, help or advice gratefully received - many thanks.

 

[KennyA]

Hello all, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes two weeks ago. This may have been caused by the steroids (prednisolone) which I have been on for six months and are now gradually decreasing. Over the last two weeks I have cut out all sugary foods and reduced my carbohydrate intake significantly. I have also been walking very briskly about 2 miles a day, most days. My finger prick test readings are mostly hovering around the "normal" levels but are sometimes about 0.5 above. For example I have just measured 8.2 , two hours after eating and I think this should be below 7.8 to be normal. Do I need to worry about a few tenths like this? I am naturally hoping I can control this by diet and exercise for the next 6 months by which time I should be off the steroids. Any comments, help or advice gratefully received - many thanks.

Hi HB Man and welcome to the forums.

All meters have an allowable error built-in. The acceptable error for a UK glucose meter is plus or minus 15% of the indicated reading. So your 8.2 reading is somewhere in a potential spread between 7.0ish and 9.4ish. You can probably demonstrate this by doing two readings in quick succession: they may well differ by quite a bit.

It might help to think about sports averages - they'll tell you something useful about an athlete's performance over a season, but maybe not a great deal about performance on any single occasion.

It's (in my opinion) therefore not worth stressing about a single reading: many people look to build up an overall picture of how they tend to respond to different foods (and exercise etc) at different times. Keeping a diary of food, exercise, illness, and BG readings helps. After a while you can often get close to predicting your readings based on your accumulated information - the error cancels itself out.

If you do get a really unusual reading it's always worth checking twice - I've accidentally reused a test strip and that gave me a very high and surprising reading.

 

[Hummingbird Man]

Hi HB Man and welcome to the forums.

All meters have an allowable error built-in. The acceptable error for a UK glucose meter is plus or minus 15% of the indicated reading. So your 8.2 reading is somewhere in a potential spread between 7.0ish and 9.4ish. You can probably demonstrate this by doing two readings in quick succession: they may well differ by quite a bit.

It might help to think about sports averages - they'll tell you something useful about an athlete's performance over a season, but maybe not a great deal about performance on any single occasion.

It's (in my opinion) therefore not worth stressing about a single reading: many people look to build up an overall picture of how they tend to respond to different foods (and exercise etc) at different times. Keeping a diary of food, exercise, illness, and BG readings helps. After a while you can often get close to predicting your readings based on your accumulated information - the error cancels itself out.

If you do get a really unusual reading it's always worth checking twice - I've accidentally reused a test strip and that gave me a very high and surprising reading.

Great! Thank you for that KennyA

 

[catinahat]

You don't need to stress over decimal points when testing because as already mentioned the meters are just not that accurate.
But to give your after meal results some meaning you need to test just before you eat, it's the difference between the two tests that tell you if your meal was acceptable.
For example if before your meal you were say high 6's - 7's then your meal only raised you around 1mmol.
If on the other hand pre meal you were 4 or 5 something, then your meal caused a 3-4 mmol rise, which means there were too many carbs in that meal for you to process.

 

[Hummingbird Man]

You don't need to stress over decimal points when testing because as already mentioned the meters are just not that accurate.
But to give your after meal results some meaning you need to test just before you eat, it's the difference between the two tests that tell you if your meal was acceptable.
For example if before your meal you were say high 6's - 7's then your meal only raised you around 1mmol.
If on the other hand pre meal you were 4 or 5 something, then your meal caused a 3-4 mmol rise, which means there were too many carbs in that meal for you to process.

OK thanks Catinahat