A1c Vs. Glucose

If you have diabetes and measure your blood glucose at home with a hand-held glucometer, the result shows the amount of glucose in your blood at a given moment. The A1c is a laboratory test that measures the average amount of the extra glucose in your blood during the past two to three months.

Identification

• Your glucometer gives a reading in milligrams of glucose in a deciliter of blood, written as mg/dl. A1c lab results are expressed as the percentage of hemoglobin molecules with glucose bound to them.

Considerations

• In order to effectively manage your diabetes, you need to know how you're doing on a particular day (mg/dl) and how you're doing overall (A1c).

History

• Patients had trouble understanding that an A1c of 8.1 percent translated to a blood glucose of 186 mg/dl, so researchers developed the eAG.

Recommendation

• Like the A1c, the eAG reflects average glucose levels over the past two to three months, but is reported in the same mg/dl as the readings from your glucometer. This is the measurement recommended by the American Diabetes Association (ADA).

Tip

• There's an easy-to-use online calculator on the ADA site to translate your A1C reading into an eAG level.