Ability of patients with type 1 diabetes in estimating their own blood glucose levels

UNLABELLED: This study was designed to assess the accuracy of self fasting blood sugar (FBG) estimation in young patients with IDOM, and to determine whether intensive self monitoring of FBG would improve the accuracy of blood sugar estimation. 37 subjects (11-19 years old, diabetics from 1 to 12 years) were studied during a 9 days educative diabetic camp. Patients were asked to guess their FBG immediately before it was analyzed with a Glucometer. The correlation between actual and estimated glycemia was 0.625 (p less than 0.01). The percent-error of estimation actual FBG--estimated FBG/actual FBG x 100 was within 30% in 55% of determination (523). There was a significant positive correlation between the absolute error of estimation and the duration of IDDM (r = -0.29; p less than 0.026) and the day of measurements (r = -0.27; p less than 0.05), but not the age of children, HbAlc levels and the hour of determination. The absolute error progressively reduced during the camp: the mean value was 62.50 +/- 55.37 mg% (n = 34) in the first day, 26.52 +/- 17.99 (n = 24) (t = 2.82; p less than 0.01) in the last day. 4 patients, in 5 estimations failed to discriminate hyperglycemia (estimated FBG less than 50 mg% versus actual FBG greater than 100 mg%) and 6 patients in 17 estimations failed to discriminate hypoglycemia (estimated FBG greater than 100 mg% versus actual FBG less than 50 mg%). CONCLUSIONS: in our study diabetic patients are accurate in guessing their FBG. They nearly always identified hyperglycemia but not always hypoglycemia. An intensive self monitoring of FBG improves the accuracy of FBG self estimation.