Tracking your blood sugar levels

The aim of diabetes management is to control blood glucose levels and to screen and treat related conditions such as high blood pressure, high bad cholesterol, and other complications of diabetes. This means that you will need to learn how to monitor your blood glucose levels, and you will also have to undergo recurrent laboratory tests and visits to your diabetologist than people without diabetes. This blog tells you how you will monitor your glucose levels.

Monitoring Diabetes

When you have diabetes, your glucose levels fluctuate much more than those of people without diabetes. In people without diabetes, fasting glucose levels in the morning are usually between 60 and 100 mg/dl. Before each meal, the levels are below 100 mg/dl. The peak values one to two hours after a meal are in the 120s and usually stay below 140, even after a meal rich in carbohydrates.

Conceptualising Home Monitoring

Blood glucose monitoring at home is an important part of diabetes management and serves a number of purposes. First, monitoring at home makes it easier to detect low blood glucose reactions, because you cannot rely on how you feel to detect low glucose levels. Many people with diabetes develop hypoglycemic unawareness meaning they can have glucose levels in the 40s and 50s and still feel quite fine. For this reason, measuring glucose levels frequently allows detection and treatment before the glucose levels fall too low. This monitoring is particularly relevant when exercising or performing activities such as driving or operating machinery, when you need to be alert.

Second, home monitoring allows you to detect high glucose levels. Elevated glucose levels may reflect dietary indiscretion or failure to take or to adjust diabetes medications. If you are on an insulin pump, there is not a big depot of insulin in the subcutaneous tissues, and if for any reason the insulin delivery gets interrupted, glucose levels can go very high and DKA can develop over a few hours. Persistently elevated high glucose levels increase the risk of developing long term complications of diabetes.

Finally, home monitoring allows you to adjust medication doses, particularly insulin. If you’re an insulin-treated patient, check your blood glucose levels at least four times or more a day. If you have type 2 diabetes controlled with diet only or are on medications that do not cause low glucose levels (like metformin, rosiglitazone, or exenatide), checking blood glucose levels a few times a week may suffice. However, if you have type 2 diabetes and are taking oral medicines that can cause low glucose levels (sulfonylureas, repaglinide, and nateglinide), one or two blood glucose checks per day are necessary.

For more information, book an appointment with qualified diabetologists. They will assist you monitor your blood sugar levels in a more secured way.