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Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Glucose Testing

I was looking at videos on YouTube of ideas for noninvasive blood glucose testing. There is a huge project looking at measuring glucose in human tears. I have a lot of issues with this.

The team working on this is making testing devices that are meant to touch the surface of the eye to get tears then analyze the glucose content. The device itself has way too many limitations to be clinically feasible. Any degree of Parkinsonism, tremors, many physical handicaps, contact lens wearers, visual difficulty, and poor hand-eye coordination will limit the ability to touch the testing device to the eye. The actual touching of the eye is quite disturbing in itself. Scratching they eye, poking the eye too hard and sterility of the device are all very real hazards.

The eye is very delicate. Please leave it alone and try to find a noninvasive way to measure blood glucose through the finger like a pulse oximeter measures oxygen saturation. There has to be something in the blood stream that will react with a different spectrum of light that will allow for quantifiable and reproducible results. It took about 40 years for the original pulse oximiter to be redesigned and put into widespread use but I believe somewhere out there in research land there is a team of scientists that can make this happen.

I want a viable noninvasive cost effective means of blood glucose measurement and like Veruca Salt "I want it now!"