Question:
I know someone isn't able to afford regular blood
testing at home.
Does anyone have experience with using Urine
testing as the regular monitoring system & blood
as an occasional one.
I tried to get info online but am getting confused.
What are diastixs? What are uristixs? what's the
different? What's better?
Answer:
The common pharmacy urine strips measure glucose, ketones, or both. The
trade names for those strips manufactured by Bayer are Diastix,
Ketostix, and Ketodiastix.
More importantly, it is important to understand what the sticks are
telling you. The renal threshold for spilling glucose in the urine is
somewhere around 180mg% or 10.0 mmol/l. Therefore, the chemstrips are
useless at BG levels below this.
In addition, it takes a while for the kidneys to process blood into
urine, so the strips tell you approximately what your BG was 2-4 hours ago.
The lack of reliable quantitive measure, along with the inherent delay,
make urine strips pretty useless, except for gross screening purposes,
like a Type-1 looking to see if they are spilling ketones, or an Atkins
dieter.
Have your friend explore the Relion brand meter and sticks from Walmart.
They are the cheapest reliable BG products using capillary blood sampling.
