Guest guest Posted July 10, 2004 Report Share Posted July 10, 2004 > Some glossary for the new guy? > AGEs? > HbA1c? > glycosylation meter? > nero? > endo? Hi Budd! Sorry about that! The " glycosylation meter " does not exist, it was just my little joke. The things that do the diabetic damage are the " advanced glycosylation endpro- ducts " , or " AGEs " for short. Glucose binds itself to proteins in the blood and the amount that remains irreversibly attached depends on the blood glucose level for which they have been there for about 4 hours or so, everything else dropping back off again. If your blood glucose level always falls back to baseline again before the AGEs have formed (which is what happens to non-diabetics) then your glycosylated HbA1c measurement will be that associated with your average baseline BG. Otherwise it will correlate closely with your average elevated BG level which is what interests diabetics. In other words, everybody has AGEs, not only diabetics - it is just a matter of how much. If you believe that theory then you can accept that the big, but short duration, peaks of BG don't matter because they are not around long enough for AGE's to form. If you don't believe that theory then you won't want to see any peaks at all. [AGEs are not confined to diabetes and have been blamed for rheumatoid arthritis and skin aging, for example. Naturally, they are part of a scientific theory that has not yet been proven - typical for diabetes!] The difficulty in my view is that we have a meter to measure the blood glucose level but no meter to measure how much glycosylation has taken place after a meal - hence my joke related to predicting the effect of a particular meal on a human being by estimating how much carbohydrate is in the meal in one form or other. Haemoblobin A1c ( " HbA1c " for short) is a particular blood protein for which the glycosylation can be measured in a laboratory from a blood sample. It is give as a percentage of glycosylated red blood cells out of the total in the sample. You can get a rough approximation to the HbA1c from BG readings by taking a lot of readings at standardized times (e.g. 7 a day for 3 days) but you still don't get any measure of how much glycosylation has taken place for any particular meal. Normally that does not matter because individual meals do not matter - it is the average that counts - although many people seem to believe that individual meals do count, I don't know with what justification! I have no idea what " endo " and " nero " mean and am also interested to find out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted July 10, 2004 Report Share Posted July 10, 2004 i do believe endo = endocrinologist and nero = neurologist. re. the average HbA1C: oh something else just came to mind. i'm sure i could say this better - my doctor also said that the test is more indicative of the previous four weeks than the first two months...with the test being doing quarterly. so anyways, another part of the reason why she said to look at results for individual meals...to aim for an average produced by being in range for the majority of meals. ok. cheers! rach > Normally that does not > matter because individual meals do not > matter - it is the average that counts > - although many people seem to believe > that individual meals do count, I don't > know with what justification! > > I have no idea what " endo " and " nero " > mean and am also interested to find out. > > Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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