If you add a small amount of pure sugar to a blood-glucose strip what would it read?

Why not try it, like any good scientist?

@gailcalled I don’t have a blood-glucose monitor… can someone do it with an extra strip?

I’m with @gailcalled. Let’s find out. And tell us what you come up with, because now I’m curious, too. :)

@TheOnlyNeffie I’m curious too : )

At the hospital it would probably come up error because it’s not blood, but if it read it would say greater than 50, >50, 500 in US?

@faye thanks…. what if you mixed it with a drop of blood?

@talljasperman it would still say > 50 because the blood would have too much sugar in it. > 50 is almost equal to death unless treated. Blood sugar readings should be 4–6 roughly.

Lets say that you tested a person’s blood for the amount of glucose and found that it contained 100 mg/dL of glucose. Now you add 500 mg of powdered glucose to one deciliter of blood from that same person. When you analyzed that spiked blood for the concentration of glucose you would have 600 mg/dL of glucose.

I’ve been curious about this too, Since i’m sorta lazy sometimes and I don’t always religiously clean and alcohol-up my finger before pricking it and wonder if any residue can taint results.

I have a spare glucometer at home, so I’ll try some of this when I get off work.

but I do know that there’s a measurable limit. When I was first diagnosed the meter at the hospital topped off at 600mg/dl, but the labwork says it was double that.

FOR SCIENCE!

@sinscriven Each blood chemistry analyzer has it’s own limits depending on the methodology. But it is easy to determine the actual glucose concentration even if the analyzer report is “too high to measure”. Simply make a 1 to 1 dilution. If that doesn’t work make a 1:5 or a 1:10 until you get valid results. Then multiply you result by your dilution factor to get the actual blood glucose level.

It depends what you mean by pure sugar. There are dozens of types of sugar. Common saccharose (sucrose) is not glucose for example.