Hba1c by instant finger prick. Available in Uk?

[MrsA2]

Hi, I've tried to search see if this has been posted before, but the words are too common or too short so I apologise if it has.

A friend has just mentioned that she was given a diabetes test as part of a routine NHS health check.
She said her number was 39, so I assumed blood glucose monitor but she said nurse had said " nearly prediabetic".
I queried numbers and method and decimal points, and friend (intelligent) was adamant it was a finger prick test with instant results. No arm blood was taken, and there was no wait for lab results.So it does seem it was an Hba1c test.

A quick Google tells me such a thing exists. All info on it refers to USA.
Does anyone know if such a thing is being used here now, in NHS?
How does it compare with standard lab tests for accuracy?

If it is now being commonly used, we are going have to be careful in our language and posts around the terminology to do with finger pricks and what they are testing, and the numbers and results

Edited for typo

 

[sgm14]

I only heard about this about a month ago and tried to do a little bit of reading up.

It's seems to be called HBA1c Point of Care Testing (or POCT)

Searching for POCT here does come up with some hits, but the last was 2019.

As I understand it, the NHS either did or possibly still does provide funding to allow hospitals/doctors surgeries to buy the equipment to perform this tests. But the NHS DPP (Diabetes Prevention Program) decided to stop using it as they did not consider it good enough for their purposes. (Would have thought that's like losing 90% of your business right there!)

There is a article (unfortunately undated) on healthcheck.nhs.uk about this.

 

[KennyA]

Hi, I've tried to search see if this has been posted before, but the words are too common or too short so I apologise if it has.

A friend has just mentioned that she was given a diabetes test as part of a routine NHS health check.
She said her number was 39, so I assumed blood glucose monitor but she said nurse had said " nearly prediabetic".
I queried numbers and method and decimal points, and friend (intelligent) was adamant it was a finger prick test with instant results. No arm blood was taken, and there was no wait for lab results.So it does seem it was an Hba1c test.

A quick Google tells me such a thing exists. All info on it refers to USA.
Does anyone know if such a thing is being used here now, in NHS?
How does it compare with standard lab tests for accuracy?

If it is now being commonly used, we are going have to be careful in our language and posts around the terminology to do with finger pricks and what they are testing, and the numbers and results

Edited for typo

Interesting. My practice has an HbA1c machine (not a standard glucometer) which works from a fingerprick blood sample and which will give an HbA1c result very quickly. It gives you a result within minutes but can, as I discovered, be really inaccurate - it once returned a value in the 50s for me when my true result as confirmed by lab test was 36 37.

I seem to remember from posts on here some years back (maybe in the now inaccessible blogs) that this rapid HbA1c testing was talked about as becoming routine a few years ago, but was accepted to be much more inaccurate than routine testing. It's also - I suppose - possible that it was a routine blood glucose fingerprick with the nurse reading across from a single random result to an estimated HbA1c - but it would be misleading and rather bad practice if that were the case.

However there's no excuse for describing a completely normal 39mmol/mol HbA1c (if that's actually what it was) as "nearly pre-diabetic". It's normal. Bit like describing a totally normal body temperature as being "nearly pre-feverish".

Edited to correct typo.

 

[SepticTank]

I toyed with the idea of buying an HbA1C test kit but it doesn't really make economical sense - at just under 50 bucks for two tests for something that might not be overly accurate, I'd rather just head to a test lab and stump up $30. Which is on the cards very soon as it is now three months since I was diagnosed and my generous insurance company will only pay for an annual test.
The other advantage with a test lab is that I can have my lipid panel done and a few other tests for a total of about $150 and make sure that my potassium, sodium, etc levels are still good and tweak my diet accordingly. My doctor's surgery will also run all those tests in house but they wallop my insurers for about $1000 and I still end up paying about $200 of that!!!

Back on topic: There are various places that sell the kits but it looks to me as though it is one company producing the kits and then just branding the identical monitor with the retailers logo, not sure how much I trust an item that is fairly cheap being produced solely by one company - why don't they put their name to their own product???

 

[Rosie9876]

Hi, I've tried to search see if this has been posted before, but the words are too common or too short so I apologise if it has.

A friend has just mentioned that she was given a diabetes test as part of a routine NHS health check.
She said her number was 39, so I assumed blood glucose monitor but she said nurse had said " nearly prediabetic".
I queried numbers and method and decimal points, and friend (intelligent) was adamant it was a finger prick test with instant results. No arm blood was taken, and there was no wait for lab results.So it does seem it was an Hba1c test.

A quick Google tells me such a thing exists. All info on it refers to USA.
Does anyone know if such a thing is being used here now, in NHS?
How does it compare with standard lab tests for accuracy?

If it is now being commonly used, we are going have to be careful in our language and posts around the terminology to do with finger pricks and what they are testing, and the numbers and results

Edited for typo

Some years ago, Boots offered instant A1c from finger prick blood for £19.99 at selected branches. As I was urgently reducing my A1c to get surgery, I needed more frequent results than my GP offered, I used Boots. The results were quite accurate against my GP's. They stopped the service, for some reaslon.

 

[spencer72]

My next a1c test is in April but have decided to get a full mot done the next time I'm in Krakow, around february. Should be around £100. Absolute bargain. An a1c test only is about £12.

 

[KennyA]

I've just had the blood draw for my yearly inspection next week. It seems my practice (mentioned above as having its own instant HbA1c machine) is no longer doing local testing, as it's all going off to the lab again. I wonder how many other people have had extremely wrong results?