Ah ha 'your pump meter', do you mean contour link? If so I won't touch that meter with a barge pole. We tried it last year as thought it was a great idea as it saved Jessica imputing her BG in the pump which she invariably forgets so we tested it 50 times against our very trusty meter and every single test bar 2 were way way lower and not what we expected. It would have meant less corrections, treating hypos that may not be hypos and therefore re less corrections it would mean high a1c.
I have chatted to the company about it and all I was told is there is a new one coming out at some point.
However forgetting all of that, do you test the second drop? I ask this because we always do, habit now, originally because sometimes you can't get to wash your hands so discard first drop of blood and test second. However I recently read an article which was really good and a part of it said always test the second drop as the first drop would contain interstitial fluid. This makes sense to me as the sensors go in the skin to swim around in interstitial fluid which is just under the skin. Also if you squeeze very hard you can be testing 'tissue' 😱 but you probably know all that anyway
x
Interested to read your experience Ardrienne. My own meter vs meter tests (Expert vs Contour vs iBGstar) showed very different er... differences
.
In my compare and contast (which started because I had some *very* erratic results from the iBGstar) the Contour and Expert read fairly similar, with the Contour being usually very slightly
higher than the Expert.
I am more and more forming the opinion that different blood chemistry (both haematocrit etc in the plasma and the chemistry/enzymes in the strips themselves) can make the difference between whether or not a particular brand works well for an
individual, rather than necessarily
is or
isn't a reliable device.
I know several others who had the same confidence issues with the iBGStar as me, but I also know others who find it's perfect for them. For Jessica the Contour read lower all the time, for me it read a little higher.
And of course we don't have lab values to test against all those meter comparisons we were doing, so there's no real way for us to tell *which* meter was right.
I do take your point about a meter that seems to continually read low (in terms of A1c and failing to correct) though by contrast I was avoiding using a meter that more often than not was reading 2mmol/L higher than its two comparators and I was worried about giving myself corrections when I didn't need them.
I believe Bayer are working on a 'Link' version of the ContourUSB, so I'll be interested to see what that's like as I do really like the bluetooth transfer of results and for me, the Contour seems to perform well within acceptable limits.
Interesting about the 'second drip'. Not heard that in many places - do you have links to any research etc that covers it?
