Confused about blood test reading

[Classic]

How is it possible to have your final meal of the day at 5:30pm. Reading at 11pm is 7.4. 1st reading AM is also 7.4! ? Especially when, 2 days earlier I ate exactly the same diet, got a night reading of 9.3 at 11pm and following morning 6.2 Is it possible my blood testing monitor is faulty? I repeated the test and got the same result of 7.4
My prescription is for 1 tablet - morning only.

 

[Lucyr]

Sounds like your blood sugars were flat overnight which is fine

 

[John Gray]

You may be expecting consistency from a highly-complex biological organism, namely the human body!
If only it was that easy...!

 

[helli]

I see nothing wrong with your meter based on the numbers you have shared.
Our BG goes up and down due to all sorts of things - my BG rises overnight when I have a bad dream, struggle to sleep, worry about work and can go down when I am relaxed, have done exercise in the last 48 hours, have a night out,
Just because your BG was 7.4 at both 11pm and 7am does not mean it stayed at exactly 7.4 all through the night it may have gone up and down multiple times.
And just because it returned to the same number once would not mean it would do the same thing with the same meal. The only way to experience this is to put yourself in a climate controlled bubble with no stress, do exactly the same exercise, catch no bugs, drink the same drinks every day at exactly the same time. I don't know about you but that does not feel like living to me.

 

[Docb]

I'm with @John Gray. It is all too easy to forget just how complicated the human system is. If a chemical engineer were asked to produce a system into which you fed random stuff from nature to produce something that could walk, talk, think, see and smile and then get it all into something the size of a human, he would tell you it would be impossible.

There are some general principles you can use for try and get your blood glucose to stay within bounds and specific measures to deal with things if your auto control system is completely broken, but even the cleverest of all the clever people could not explain why your BG was the same as when you went to bed when you got up in the morning one day and was something different the next. He might give you a couple of guesses which might be relevant, but a never a complete explanation.

My thought is not to try too hard when it comes to interpretation of BG changes. It will drive you potty. To me it is better to focus on the broader picture and reckon you are doing OK if you are averaging under 8 and your HbA1c is below 48 - or even 55 if you are older.

 

[Classic]

Sounds like your blood sugars were flat overnight which is fine

Thanks Lucy. I prefer straight talking anyway. 🙂

 

[Classic]

You may be expecting consistency from a highly-complex biological organism, namely the human body!
If only it was that easy...!

Good morning, John. Since retiring, nothing my body does surprises me any more! But I did expect consistency from my
inanimate glucose monitoring devise. Wonder if they send me an 'old' one

 

[Classic]

I see nothing wrong with your meter based on the numbers you have shared.
Our BG goes up and down due to all sorts of things - my BG rises overnight when I have a bad dream, struggle to sleep, worry about work and can go down when I am relaxed, have done exercise in the last 48 hours, have a night out,
Just because your BG was 7.4 at both 11pm and 7am does not mean it stayed at exactly 7.4 all through the night it may have gone up and down multiple times.
And just because it returned to the same number once would not mean it would do the same thing with the same meal. The only way to experience this is to put yourself in a climate controlled bubble with no stress, do exactly the same exercise, catch no bugs, drink the same drinks every day at exactly the same time. I don't know about you but that does not feel like living to me.

Good morning Helli, Thanks for the reply. As they say, we never stop living and learning.

 

[helli]

But I did expect consistency from my
inanimate glucose monitoring devise.

And that's something else that you can add to the equation of variations.
The decimal point in the results your meter reports does not indicate accuracy.

Blood glucose meters need to comply with a standard that requires the results to be within 15% of the "true" BG 95% of the time. So it may not be consistent with itself and never try to get consistency between two meters.

 

[Classic]

I'm with @John Gray. It is all too easy to forget just how complicated the human system is. If a chemical engineer were asked to produce a system into which you fed random stuff from nature to produce something that could walk, talk, think, see and smile and then get it all into something the size of a human, he would tell you it would be impossible.

There are some general principles you can use for try and get your blood glucose to stay within bounds and specific measures to deal with things if your auto control system is completely broken, but even the cleverest of all the clever people could not explain why your BG was the same as when you went to bed when you got up in the morning one day and was something different the next. He might give you a couple of guesses which might be relevant, but a never a complete explanation.

My thought is not to try too hard when it comes to interpretation of BG changes. It will drive you potty. To me it is better to focus on the broader picture and reckon you are doing OK if you are averaging under 8 and your HbA1c is below 48 - or even 55 if you are older.

Good morning, Doc B. Thank you for the reply. There was me thinking I was just a simple soul and it turns out I'm a complex puzzle all rolled up in an enigma. I guess I just need to be a bit more relaxed and go with flow.
🙂

 

[Classic]

And that's something else that you can add to the equation of variations.
The decimal point in the results your meter reports does not indicate accuracy.

Blood glucose meters need to comply with a standard that requires the results to be within 15% of the "true" ,BG 95% of the time. So it may not be consistent with itself and never try to get consistency between two meters.

Thanks for that little gem, Helli.

 

[grovesy]

I rarely get the same results eating the same things.

 

[Docb]

Thanks for that little gem, Helli.

Somewhere on the forum there is a report of the time (when i was trying to make sense of blood glucose readings) when I jabbed all 10 digits one after the other to see what the reproducibility was like. Led to the conclusion that you can round the result to the nearest whole number and then you need differences greater than 2 before you can begin to think that the differences might be significant.

This is not a criticism of the meters - I think it is a bit of a miracle that anybody can make a compact, easy to use device that gets anywhere near a blood glucose reading. Getting to +/- 2 mmol/mol is damn good going in my book. The meters revolutionised blood glucose control for T1's with that level of reproducibility so you cannot knock them.