Hbac And Mmol Levels

tigerrunfree said:

Hi all. I was diagnosed in Feb with Type 2. My levels were 53mmol and 7.1. My latest blood test came back at 40mmol. What does this mean please?

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There's a useful graph which helps make sense of it, see pic below.

The 53 and 40 are your hbA1c number, measuring the amount of glucose which get chemically bonded onto red blood cells over the course of their 2 to 3 month life span.

The more glucose you've got swimming around in your blood, the more glucose there is to get stuck, so the higher the number will be.

It acts as a rough guide to what your average bg levels have been over the last few months.

Because hbA1c is quite easy to measure, it's widely used as a gauge for control.

Excess glucose will also attach itself to nerves, which can end up causing complications like neuropathy, so the a1c is used as a proxy to gauge what might be happening elsewhere in the body.

There are different ways of expressing the measurement. It used to be percent but then moved to mmol/mol, but some hospitals still quote both, so the 53 and 40 will be the mmol/mol and the 7 is probably 7% - see the pic: 53 is 7% in old money - but it might also have been 7 from a spot test blood meter showing your actual bg level at that point in time.

Both 53 and 40 are in the green zone, the drop shows you're getting further into the safe zone, so it's all looking good!

@Scott-C That is a really useful graph, I'm aiming to get to the 31-42 range by next years check up.

Knikki said:

@Scott-C That is a really useful graph, I'm aiming to get to the 31-42 range by next years check up.

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Etch-a-Sketch will help you get there!

Mines has dropped from 41 to 36 to 34 to 28 over the last 2 years without trying too hard and not having any serious hypos. I'm loosening up a bit to get back into the 30s.

Just being able to see how my levels are moving makes all the difference. Docs are convinced low a1cs must be because of lots of hypos, so I show them the AGP graph and they say, ok, fair do, it's not hypos.

One of the things which makes a major difference to reducing a1c is not going over 10 too much. Once you're more familiar with the ins and outs of libre, I'd highly recommend getting one of the transmitters, either the blucon which I use, or the miaomiao which Mel uses.

Set the high alarm to, say, 8, it means you'll get woken up if you start heading to above 10 and pin it with a unit or two. The low alarm will catch you on the way down if the bolus is too much..

Before cgm, I had too many occasions where I'd do a miscalc on that Friday night kebab/fish and chips and would end up at 12 to 15 for several hours. With cgm, I can pin it.

Iron out those >10s and a1c really plummets.

@Scott-C & @Knikki - I’m so hoping to get into the 5s (<40) at my next HbA1c in a couple of weeks... although with the stubborn dawn phenomenon I’ve had, I’ll be grateful if it hasn’t risen from the 43 (6.1%) at my last one in April. It’ll be interesting to see what effect my week old pump has on the one after that, though

@Scott-C funny you say that but busy looking into miaomiao at the moment, I might hold off getting one for a couple of weeks as mooching around the web a number of people are reporting problems with them and Libres.

Will keep an eye on them but yes on the shopping list

Knikki said:

@Scott-C funny you say that but busy looking into miaomiao at the moment, I might hold off getting one for a couple of weeks as mooching around the web a number of people are reporting problems with them and Libres.

Will keep an eye on them but yes on the shopping list

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What sort of problems, lovely? The only time I’ve had a problem is when my husband stuck it on, but left a small gap between it and the Libre, so it couldn’t read it. I reattached it and it was fine until I accidentally pinged the whole assembly across my bedroom with my bra strap. I’m available for parties

If you do get one, get a load of the double stickers too! Those plus Skin Tac wipes resist all but the pingiest of bra straps...

tigerrunfree said:

Hi all. I was diagnosed in Feb with Type 2. My levels were 53mmol and 7.1. My latest blood test came back at 40mmol. What does this mean please?

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you really have made a fine progress

Mel dCP said:

What sort of problems, lovely? The only time I’ve had a problem is when my husband stuck it on, but left a small gap between it and the Libre, so it couldn’t read it. I reattached it and it was fine until I accidentally pinged the whole assembly across my bedroom with my bra strap. I’m available for parties

If you do get one, get a load of the double stickers too! Those plus Skin Tac wipes resist all but the pingiest of bra straps...

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At the moment I'm reading that people are finding that the miaomiao are just either not transmitting or failing after a couple of days, but this seems only to have been reported in the last few weeks. Maybe they have had an upsurge in demand and QA has slipped.

And after reading your reply I will either book you for the party tricks or try the bra strap myself, sure there is one around here that will fit

Knikki said:

as mooching around the web a number of people are reporting problems with them and Libres.

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It's the same as a lot of this new tech - works for some, not for others, and it often depends on the phone being used.

I have an occasional glance at a developer website, where the mm makers were talking to the xdrip developers to get it running on xdrip ok.

https://gitter.im/miaomiaoSDK/Lobby

Some of the xdrip guys were pointing out that there were problems with mm having to be very close to the sensor to read it ok - seemed that if there was an "air gap" of more than a millimetre, it was screwed.

Others mentioned that it was fine on some phones used in testing but when it was exposed to the hundreds of phones out there in the real world, it might throw a few fliers because of the different ways phones deal with bluetooth.

The devices, both blucon and miaomiao, are fairly solid pieces of hardware, but the problem is maintaining their bluetooth connectivity to the phone.

Bluetooth is unregulated free radio. Plenty of things can mess it up. Samsung phones are buggy. Doing more than one bluetooth thing at a time can kill it.

I've lucked out - I'm still using a Sept 2017 version of xdrip with blucon, it's got lots of ways of sorting out bluetooth flim-flam, I regularly get the full 288 readings per day. Some people who are using later versions are losing connectivity - not just blucon, the dexcom users too. I suspect that the newer versions have fixed one thing and broken another.

I'm not on miaomiao, so I don't know what the score is with that. I've seen a few threads about disconnects, which brings it back to the main problem - ok with some phones, maybe not with others.

Definitely worth giving it a go, though.

I’m using MM with an iPhone 8+ And haven’t had any drops in Bluetooth connectivity as long as there’s no gap. The curve in the underside of it fits the sensor precisely, you just need to make sure you butt them up properly. There’s a sticker for the instep to fix it to the sensor plus a bigger one to stick the larger part to your arm.

tigerrunfree said:

Hi all. I was diagnosed in Feb with Type 2. My levels were 53mmol and 7.1. My latest blood test came back at 40mmol. What does this mean please?

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Hi @tigerrunfree. It means you have lowered your blood glucose level from diabetic to non-diabetic range. Well done!
Non diabetic is below 42, pre-diabetic is 42-47, and diabetic is 48 and above.