Morning all. Waiting for second HbA1c test, but using finger prick testing to start identifying what’s what. Average BG is around 8-9 on a daily basis - not particularly high I’d have thought, but would that be sufficiently high to make me feel super tired? Or am I just knackered
Thanks in advance
Hiya.
High BGs make/made me feel very tired, and it's a well known symptom of high blood glucose levels. If you're feeling tired all the time and as you have elevated BGs that would IMO be a possible cause - could be other things as well, of course.
The thing with fingerprick testing is that there are a couple of caveats:
*a single test is a snapshot of where you were at the point you tested. It doesn't tell you if you were stable, rising or falling.
*blood glucose is sensitive to a number of things as well as food
*if you're not testing before and 2 hours after eating, you may be missing the impact of what you've eaten on your BG
*you don't know what's happening when you don't test - when asleep, for example
*the test is required to be accurate to plus or minus 15%, 95% of the time. This means in practical terms two readings of (eg) 8.0 and 9.0 are essentially the same given possible acceptable error
*averaging tests might possibly allow you to guess what your A1c might be (it didn't for me) or it might just magnify the error and the problems above. Averaging a reading before food with a reading after food tells you nothing useful. Knowing the rise after eating and the time the rise takes to return to baseline is however very useful in working out how you respond to particular carbs and what foods you might need to elimininate
*there 's a difference between an average of 9 where all your readings cluster around 8 or 9 and an average of 9 where your individual readings range from (say) 6 to 19.
I think fingerprick testing is invaluable, if it's used as a tool - particularly to manage and adjust carb intake and therefore lower BG impact. In my view it's less useful as a "monitor" of where your BGs are generally - the HbA1c (again with some caveats) gives you a better picture.
Thanks in advance
