Diabetes Living with Diabetes

How Sweet It Is: Monitoring Blood Sugar at Home

Are there other kinds of devices that people can use to measure their own blood sugar?
There are some devices that can be worn like a wristwatch that take a blood sugar reading from fluid drawn from under the skin with electrodes, rather than from blood. These devices run on disks that adhere to the skin and should be changed periodically. These devices can read levels as frequently as every 10 minutes and be worn for as long as 13 hours, and there is an alarm that goes off when blood sugar levels rise too high or fall too low. They are very helpful for pregnant mothers who want to catch low blood glucose that occurs at night. Although people will think of these devices as a replacement, they are more of a useful supplement to standard glucose monitoring because they can take so many readings.

How does self–glucose monitoring help someone control their diabetes?
It's like keeping a diary. When you work with a professional team, we look for patterns. Patients bring the history of all the blood sugar levels they've done to the appointment.

We try to determine if there are any confounding factors that might be affecting your blood sugar. For example, if someone's blood sugar is always high at noontime or in the evening, we can try to figure out if we should make any alterations in either their food or medicine that might help them keep their blood glucose in the target range at that time of day. Sometimes people forget to take their medicines, or maybe their medicine has gone bad or is outdated. The meter can serve as a good alert system to these kinds of problems.

Research tells us that if people consistently stay in the target range for their blood sugar, they can lessen the complications of diabetes. If you don't self-monitor, there is less information to work with. The more information someone can give us, the better we're able to help them problem-solve.

How often should people monitor their glucose levels?
It depends on the type of diabetes they have and which treatment plan they are using. For people with type 2 diabetes for instance, who are on meal planning alone, we might recommend at least twice daily, one test in the morning before they eat and another one perhaps two hours after a meal in the afternoon. For people with type 2 diabetes who are on oral medication or insulin, we would recommend a blood sugar test in the morning before they eat, and then one two hours after their big meal of the day. If they can do some pre- and post-meal testing on occasion, that's useful to make sure that the medicine is working and to find out if we need to make adjustments.

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