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Types of diabetes tests

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Diabetic clinics will conduct several different tests on a patient to determine how well they are managing their diabetes:

Blood sugar test

Blood sugar test – this measures the amount of sugar in a person’s blood at the time the test was taken. This will give an indication of how well the body is processing sugar. However it is limited to the time the test it completed.

HbA1c test

HbA1c test – measures haemoglobin levels in the blood, but has nothing to do with whether a person is anaemic or not. Haemoglobin is also a chemical that is produced in response to a patient’s diabetic control. It can tell a specialist the type of control a diabetic has had over their blood-glucose levels in the past three months. The worse the diabetic control, the higher the level of HbA1c.

Dr Paul Stillman, an expert in health education, explains more: “HbA1c is a very good test, not just at finding out whether things are OK on the day, because we all clean our teeth before we go to the dentist, don’t we – it is a much better test at finding out whether we are really getting our diabetes under control and if the HbA1c level is up then we really should be talking with our doctor to see if there are ways of bringing it down.

Dr Paul Stillman, General Practitioner
Expert in health education
Chief medical adviser of Streaming Well