Yet another article I came across today tells me there’s going to be a new method of taking your long term glucose (what I assume they mean is your HbA1c) without taking blood.

Essentially, there’s talk of ‘a machine which can detect glucose levels accurately by the fluorscence of skin under ultra-violet light‘. Said machine doesn’t actually exist yet, but clinical trials (lasting about two years) are about to kick off in Canterbury. Apparently the machine would be able to read your long term data after shining a fluoro light at your skin for a couple of minutes.

While this sounds pretty unexciting and un-imminent, (I don’t really mind having an actual blood test once every 3-6 months, and two years away seems like ages) – I’m pretty excited about what this might mean for our daily blood prick tests. I guess the HbA1c test is quite different from the immediate ‘what is my BG now’ test (I understand the HbA1c measures how much glucose is stuck to your red blood cells), I reckon if they can refine the long term test, hopefully they can figure out along the way how to give us this technology for our daily tests too.

Article, as it appeared on Stuff, here: http://www.stuff.co.nz/4740031a11.html