Hi, some help please.

At your age, did your doctor actually make sure you are not a T1 diabetic, or did he just assume T2.
What were the circumstances of the diagnosis? Did symptoms come on slowly or rapidly? Are you gaining or losing weight?
Give us this information, and we'll be able to point you in the right direction, or at least explain things.



Metformin is a good medicine, but "diastix", are these for dipping urine? :?
If so what you need is a blood sugar meter. Dipping urine won't tell you how high your blood glucose is, just how much glucose has spilled over your renal threshold since you last emptied your bladder. that's not actually much help. It is, however, cheap. The best use of Urine sticks is to identify which food or drink you might be about to ingest, that might have glucose in it. you dip the food.
In any case if you don't change your eating habits, Metformin alone won't get you down into the safe zone, which is below 7mmol/l in blood :? .
Read the threads on success stories and low carb eating. If you don't know what a carb is,read my carbohydrate 101 post.

I not sure how many will be able to answer your question

As disatix, is a very old fashioned method of testing glucose on the urine, and if used now is really as a indictor of whether Glucose is present! And I know that yes I have used them way back in the past but can't remember what was a good or bad reading

Normally you monitor your blood glugose level visa a glucose montior and test strips to get your monitoring reading...

I'm surprised that a T2 was made stright away due to your age, but not unheard of, it depends what symptons that are present when you present ourself..

You could either ring your GP and ask for another appointment so that he can tell you more about the results on your monitoring, or ask to see the practice nurse for more inforamtiom.

Hi qbix,
As Jopar says, urine testing is a very poor method for determining blood sugar levels. At best it will show whether or not glucose is present. I just had a look at the Patient UK website, which publishes guidelines for GPs and they say "When compared with blood glucose monitoring, urinalysis for measurement of urinary glucose is a very imprecise method for monitoring glucose control in diabetes mellitus."

In other words GPs should not be prescribing urine testing sticks these days. Get yourself a glucose test monitor. A supplier that many have recommended is Abbott Laboratories who produce the Freestyle tester. If you phone them (01628 773355) they will probably send you one free.

We use diastix to test draft cola to make sure it is the diet version.

Most people pee out sugar in their urine once their blood sugar goes above 11. If your morning pee shows positive for sugar it is an indication that your blood sugar has risen at some point above 11 in the night. Normal bs is 4.6 so you can see their is a big difference.

I can see doctors giving out more diastix these days to keep down costs for strips.

An old rule of thumb is: If your morning urine shows glucose you need more medications. If your urine is positive through the day you had too much carbohydrate containing food at some point.