A comment on this post led me to have another look at the ‘new’ international standard which has come in to eventually replace the HbA1c results which our doctors benchmark our diabetes control on.

I say ‘new’, because the new ‘molar’ system has actually been available in our lab reports since August last year. Apparently our blood glucose control will be reported both as an HbA1c and in mmol/mol for two years, after which time we’ll switch to solely mmol/mol. The reason for this is to foster international measurement of blood glucose control, as instigated by the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry (IFCC).

To give you a better idea of how these numbers look, here is a table taken from the Diabetes NZ site:

To get an idea about your current HbA1c presented as a molar measurement, there is a calculator here on the Diabetes UK site:

http://www.diabetes.org.uk/HbA1c

Important to note: this is not a change to the way our meters will read our instant BGs – they will remain in mmol/l.