Accurate Blood Sugar Readings Are at Your Fingertips
July 9, 2001 -- Pricking your finger every day to test your blood for its sugar content is the painful reality of people with diabetes. Recently, relatively pain free devices that take blood from the forearm have become available, but are they accurate?
People with diabetes don't produce enough of or respond appropriately to a hormone called insulin, which is needed to control the level of sugar in the blood. As a result, many diabetics must routinely check their blood sugar levels to make sure they're within a healthy range.
Checking blood sugar levels has, until recently, involved taking a painful finger prick. Now manufacturers are answering the need for a less painful way of testing for sugar in the blood by developing devices that require only a very tiny amount of blood from an alternate site on the body, namely the forearm.
New research, however, has called into question the accuracy of blood sugar testing from the forearm. Author of the study, Theodor Koschinsky, MD, PhD, tells WebMD that during rapid blood sugar changes "clinically relevant differences" occurred in blood sugar readings taken from the forearm and the fingertip. He is from the German Diabetes Research Institute and an associate professor at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany.
Koschinsky and his colleague gave men with diabetes a high sugar breakfast followed by a strong insulin treatment in order to make their blood sugar levels go very high then very low. They used both a finger prick device and a forearm device to check their blood sugar levels at several points during the study.
When the amount of sugar in the blood was rising or dropping rapidly, only the finger prick testing accurately caught these rapid changes. It took about 30 minutes for the forearm values to catch up to those reported by the finger prick tests. This research was presented recently in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association.
C. Kurt Alexander, MD, CDE, FACP, has also performed research on the accuracy of forearm vs. finger prick blood sugar testing for Roche Diagnostics, the makers of blood sugar testing devices. He also found that, "a drop of blood out of your forearm is not [always] the same as a drop of blood out of your fingertip."
People with diabetes don't produce enough of or respond appropriately to a hormone called insulin, which is needed to control the level of sugar in the blood. As a result, many diabetics must routinely check their blood sugar levels to make sure they're within a healthy range.
Checking blood sugar levels has, until recently, involved taking a painful finger prick. Now manufacturers are answering the need for a less painful way of testing for sugar in the blood by developing devices that require only a very tiny amount of blood from an alternate site on the body, namely the forearm.
New research, however, has called into question the accuracy of blood sugar testing from the forearm. Author of the study, Theodor Koschinsky, MD, PhD, tells WebMD that during rapid blood sugar changes "clinically relevant differences" occurred in blood sugar readings taken from the forearm and the fingertip. He is from the German Diabetes Research Institute and an associate professor at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany.
Koschinsky and his colleague gave men with diabetes a high sugar breakfast followed by a strong insulin treatment in order to make their blood sugar levels go very high then very low. They used both a finger prick device and a forearm device to check their blood sugar levels at several points during the study.
When the amount of sugar in the blood was rising or dropping rapidly, only the finger prick testing accurately caught these rapid changes. It took about 30 minutes for the forearm values to catch up to those reported by the finger prick tests. This research was presented recently in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association.
C. Kurt Alexander, MD, CDE, FACP, has also performed research on the accuracy of forearm vs. finger prick blood sugar testing for Roche Diagnostics, the makers of blood sugar testing devices. He also found that, "a drop of blood out of your forearm is not [always] the same as a drop of blood out of your fingertip."