Understanding Different Types of Diabetes Testing
Early diagnosis is very important for the proper management and treatment of diabetes. In fact, if someone is detected with diabetes at a very early stage, the damages caused by diabetes will be a minimum and the individual can have more opportunities to combat against the disease. Part of living with diabetes implies living with different types of diabetes testing; however, a little few people have sufficient knowledge about diabetes testing. This article exclusively focuses on providing its reader an overview of different types of diabetes testing.
About High Blood Glucose Level
Prior understanding about different types of diabetes testing, you should know the role of blood glucose level in the diabetic condition. Doctors detect diabetes based on too-high level of glucose present within blood. If you are suffering from diabetes, your blood glucose level becomes higher due to the foods you consume. However, foods have very little impact on blood glucose level for those people not suffering from diabetes.
Insulin, a hormone releasing from pancreas, permits glucose to enter into the body cells, so that it can be used for energy production. Hence, insulin is the most effective tool to promote balance in the blood glucose level. Individuals suffering from diabetes can acquire either insulin deficiency or insulin resistance. In either way it means that their system does not respond well to the function of insulin.
For diabetic people, as because insulin is not functioning properly, it leads to the formation of blockage in the way glucose enters to the body cell for producing energy. Instead, their unutilized glucose accumulates in their blood and traverses the kidney if the glucose level becomes higher than optimum, which is indeed fatal to health.
Urine Tests
Although high urine glucose level can be identified as a warning signal, the urine test is not a good option for diabetes testing. In fact, urine tests do not offer validity or reliability as much as blood tests do. The amount of glucose coming through urination largely varies from person to person. It may be possible that you are having high glucose level, however, your urine does not show that much. So, in order to diagnose diabetes, doctors largely depend on blood tests.
Blood Tests
The primary objective of blood glucose test is to identify whether your blood glucose level is very high or not. There are two major types of diabetes blood testing - screening and diagnostic. Screening tests are for those individuals showing no apparent symptoms of diabetes, however, their health condition is somehow suspicious. The diagnostic tests are used to corroborate a diagnosis for those who have already shown diabetic symptoms.
Random plasma glucose test, fasting plasma glucose test, oral glucose tolerance test are the commonly used diagnostic test. The fasting plasma glucose test is useful for detecting diabetes. Among all these tests, fasting plasma glucose test is easy and effective. If the fasting plasma glucose level is higher than 126mg/dL consistently, it can be diagnosed as diabetic condition. For random plasma glucose test, if the level is higher than 200mg/dL, it indicates diabetes.
The oral glucose tolerance test is complex and needs to be conducted in different phases. It measures blood glucose level 5 times within a timeframe of 3 hours. Individuals having glucose level ranging between normal and diabetic possess impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) and they are not diagnosed having diabetes.
