It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. My endo practice still hadn't changed my official dx to T1, I was required to send daily logs every 2 weeks, and I had to visit every 3 months. I can't believe it all got resolved, finally!
Logs - he said it's by need, and I obviously don't need to. Just bring in a week or two worth of logs at visits.
Appointments - no problem going to 6 months instead of 3.
Dx - my lab slip finally says T1! Been fighting it for ages. My GAD results were low, but as Melitta said a little GAD antibody is like being a little pregnant.
He's really happy with how I'm doing, the usual warnings that my target BG of 90 is low, so to watch for hypos. Noted that I have very few so he's fine with it. I'm not thrilled that my A1C went from 5.5 to 5.7, but as he pointed out there's room for lab error, etc., and 5.7 ain't 1/2 bad. So I guess I won't stress about it! He also commented that I have a lot of different basals, but that it's obviously working.
Interesting factoid... he said that in his practice, the number one reason people give up on the Dexcom isthat they find the alarms too frequent/annoying, and they only
have it set to alarm at 400!! I wish there were a way to help people understand what they're doing to themselves ;(
Did he happen to mention what the margin of error for the A1C tests is? I always sort of wonder how accurate they are? If it was +/- 20% like a BG machine...
I'm a type 1; I work in a lab and run A1c's. They aren't run like a glucose is run on a glucometer, so it isn't really comparable.
I have wondered about the real margin of error too.. I might have someone draw me and run my own blood like 10 times and see how tight the results are. It would be cool to know :)
Hi jrtpup. Congratulations on the beautiful day in the neighborhood, esp. the very fine 5.7 A1C. As for the T1, good to have the correct diagnosis and noone will ever argue with you about needing insulin! Still don't understand the need for logs when you've got a meter/pump to download. Anyway, Cheers!
LOL, I knew it wasn't like glucose but it is a scientific measurement and I vaguely recall something to the effect that all numbers are +/- some %age which makes me wonder what the "score" is on an A1C? That'd be neat to try an experiment like that in your lab though!
I'm assuming it's a HPLC test method. Variability could be due to dirty columns or variations from machine to machine that are within calibrated tolerance. For a robust medical method like that, I would guess +/- 0.2% sounds about right.
