
November 11, 2002
Blood Tests and Insulin Injections
Question from Mumbai, India:
Because of financial problems, almost all of our patients use visual blood glucose test strips. How reliable is this compared to a glucose meter or a lab sugar?
Answer:
It must be twenty years since we used these kind of strips so that memories are a little hazy, but two of us agreed that the strips tended to read lower than the actual blood sugar as measured in a clinical laboratory and that the overall precision of comparison charts were significantly less than with a meter.
There are several websites for that discuss the use of these visual strips which can by found by searching on Google. However, the information seems to be in French or Spanish, and I could find no comparisons with more modern methods.
DOB