HbA1c film

Your HbA1c is a brilliant measure of where your diabetes management is. Glucose is needed in the body for energy and it's carried to different parts of the body where we need it. If levels of unused glucose rise in the blood, more of it sticks to the bit of the red blood cell that carries oxygen called haemoglobin. Glucose needs insulin to actually enter different organs, different cells, different parts of the body. But if there's no insulin and the glucose cannot enter, they're stuck on that red blood cell and going round and round and round. Your HbA1c is looking at the amount of glucose which sticks to your red blood cells in your blood. It's a red blood cell and it's concave in shape and it's squashy, it's able to change shape depending on what it carries. So the little yellow dots in there are the glucose molecules. It's a G for glucose. So this red blood cell that I'm picking up now is representing a normal HbA1c, and the normal HbA1c is less than 42. The HbA1c used to have an old money system and it was in percentages. And your health care professional would have said, oh, it's this percentage, it's that percentage. But now we talk about millimoles per mole in the blood. Your normal HbA1c, which is below 42, as you can see, there's lots of space for other things to go onto the red blood cell for them to be taxied around the blood. It's quite nice and bendy. This taxi can go everywhere, especially into smaller venuals like the back of your eye or in your kidneys or even the venuals in your fingers and toes. So, if you have a HbA1c blood test done by your GP and you are told you have diabetes, you need to come in and we need to have a chat about it, Your HbA1c will be a level of 48 or above and this is where our normal red blood cell starts to look a bit more like this one. If it goes higher and higher and as you can see I've got a rather packed red blood cell there with lots and lots of glucose there. These red blood cells live for about three months and then they die and we make new ones. My last HbA1c last July was 43, so that was a bit of a shock. So that was classed as in the pre-diabetes range. Whether it's pre-diabetes or whether it's high in the 90s or 100s diet and lifestyle changes will help to bring that HbA1c down and any reduction is going to be better than not doing anything. You won't forget your HbA1c now because you will visualise Claire's a daughter's red tights with all the glucose molecules sticking to them, so you won't forget what each of the tights resemble when you next get your HbA1c. How's that?