My sister has gestational diabetes, and last night we all decided to check our blood sugar with her meter (don’t ask why). Tt had been aboutthree and a half hours since I had eaten or had anything to drink but water and mine was 224 mg/dl [12.4 mmol/L] which was higher than anyone. Should I be concerned? I had eaten a barbecue hamburger with about a teaspoon of ranch dressing, about a handful of tortilla chips, and a small piece of watermelon for lunch.

In a word, yes, you should be concerned. See Classification and Diagnosis of Diabetes. What to do next? Testing for diabetes should include blood sugar levels performed by a medical laboratory. The timing of the sample (fasting, random, or postprandial) would influence how high a level is considered abnormal.

Another test, the glycosylated hemoglobin, might be used to help confirm a suspected diagnosis of diabetes, but the GHB (also called HbA1c or A1c) is not usually considered as appropriate to make an initial diagnosis. Antibody testing is occasionally done as a screening test in high-risk situations, or as confirmatory of type�1A (autoimmune) diabetes, but is not part of routine testing.

Repeated home glucose testing, when done, might be elevated, which would make the situation more urgent to get lab testing done to confirm the abnormal results. However, repeated home glucose testing, if normal, would not exclude diabetes.

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