Self-test to control blood sugar….

Today's Post: Thursday, 6-11-2009

If you have a sore throat you know you are sick or may be coming down sick. But in the early stages, if you have high blood sugar, you may be completely clueless that you do.

Why worry about that?

For two reasons.:

It’s like correcting being a bit off course while flying in the early stages.

First, if you find out in the early stages while your blood sugar is only a little high, it’s much easier to correct and may even be fully reversible.

Second, you don’t wind up somewhere you didn’t want to go -- maybe even crash landing.

Blood sugar being too high is very like that. If it’s only a bit too high, you can still eat better and exercise more or better and put it back where it should be.

But if you wait until it’s much higher one of two things will happen, after your doctor or health plan tests you for high blood sugar, your doctor will diagnose you with type 2 diabetes and insist on having you take drugs for it – OR you’ll get frightening symptoms from the damage the high blood sugar is causing you as your first sign it’s high. NOT good!

That can be an unexpected heart attack or suddenly having numbness in different places or suddenly having blurry vision as you drive on the freeway.

And, if it’s uncorrected if after it gets really high, high blood sugar can cause blindness, senility, heart attacks, kidney damage bad enough to cause death or require dialysis, and/or foot amputation.

In addition, your body will have developed damage in its systems to correct the high blood sugar and it can be much, much harder to correct with eating better, exercise, and other nondrug methods.

The old situation was this.:

Until just recently, you had to get a fasting glucose test or a special test of your average blood sugar over the past 60 to 90 days called the HBA1C test to know if your blood sugar was too high. And you had to have your doctor or your health plan authorize that.

(Since your red blood cells live about 60 to 90 days, by testing the sugar stuck to them, the HBA1C test gives you a rather precise and accurate measure of your average blood sugar during that time. It’s so accurate in fact, doctors are now told to always use it to diagnose type 2 diabetes instead of fasting glucose which can be misleadingly high or low occasionally.)

So, you had to pay for a doctor visit &/or have health insurance to get these tests.

And, if your blood sugar was only a little high, you could have drugs prescribed for you or be diagnosed as having type 2 diabetes which then stays on your record permanently even if you later reverse the high blood sugar by eating better and exercise.

The consequences of having high blood sugar are so horrible, it was still a good idea to do.

And, if your blood sugar is quite high and you don’t yet know, it can save your life to have it tested that way even now.

But that was last month.

Today, you can test for it yourself for only about $30.

A company in the Silicon Valley, called Metrika, developed a simple and easy to use portable tester for HBA1C. It did work; but they didn’t have the manufacturing expertise to make thousands of them that were both accurate and reasonably priced.

But the drug giant Bayer bought them. Bayer had the money to hire the expertise and already had some of it inhouse in their drug manufacturing lines.

First, they made a version that they sold to doctors who then used it to get fast results when testing patients in their offices.

But they also began work on a version they could sell over the counter just like you can buy at home blood pressure testers.

It took them many months to get it right well enough to release it with the Bayer name on it. But they did.

Now, for about $30 you can buy a kit that will give you two HBA1C tests at home.

http://www.a1cnow.com/patients-families/a1cnow-self/ is the page that tells about it though it is clearly meant to be used mostly by people who already have been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes instead of by people who may well not have it testing to see if their blood sugar is OK or beginning to be too high or already is too high.

That page has a link to this one: http://www.a1cnow.com/patients-families/a1cnow-self/

And, on that page it has a link to where you can buy it now through Walgreens online drugstore.

(They plan to add other retailers soon as well.)

So for about $30 you can test yourself to see where you are now with your blood sugar.

And, if it’s a bit high but not in the scary zone yet, you can test yourself again in 3 months to see if the fixes you did by eating less sugar etc and exercising more have put it back in the safe zone or not.

Here’s what the numbers mean.:

An HBA1C test of 5.8 or less is good and less than 5.5 is better.

From 5.8 to 5.9, that’s close enough to too high you should eat sugar less often, eliminate soft drinks of every kind, stop eating foods with high fructose corn syrup or refined grains in them and white potatoes; and you should get more regular exercise – at least some walking each week. (The good news is that if you do this, you’ll automatically begin to lose excess fat with no extra effort. You may even be LESS hungry.)

Some doctors will classify you as having type 2 diabetes at 6.0 to 6.4. I recently saw that the mainstream position may be to wait until 6.5 or higher to do so. But know this, if you have a reading of 6.0 to 6.4 now, you will have a reading of 6.5 or higher soon unless you take strong corrective steps. In addition to eating right, it is essential that you begin to build up to regular, vigorous exercise from strength training or interval cardio done every week, preferably both.

And, it may pay you to see your doctor. You definitely want to take strong, focused, and sustained action until you get your HBA1C at 5.9 or below as soon as you can.

At 6.5 to 6.9 you should immediately schedule an appointment with your doctor.

And, at 7.0 or even a bit higher, the appointment should be within a few days!

Above 6.5 your health of every kind is at stake in bringing down your blood sugar levels -- with drugs if you have to. And, at these levels, you should be taking the drugs.

Blood sugar that high begins to destroy your capillaries. Every part of you depends on good circulation of your blood as delivered by healthy capillaries. You want turn off the destruction before you lose something like your sight or your kidneys or your life!

Now you can get an early look at where you stand on blood sugar for just a few dollars.

Metrika and Bayer have created a lifesaving test.

Try it out. You may be VERY glad you did.