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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 28 2020, @06:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the see-thru-glasses dept.

Researchers hope to make needle pricks for diabetics a thing of the past:

Patients with diabetes have to test their blood sugar levels several times a day to make sure they are not getting too high or too low. Studies have shown that more than half of patients don't test often enough, in part because of the pain and inconvenience of the needle prick.

One possible alternative is Raman spectroscopy, a noninvasive technique that reveals the chemical composition of tissue, such as skin, by shining near-infrared light on it. MIT scientists have now taken an important step toward making this technique practical for patient use: They have shown that they can use it to directly measure glucose concentrations through the skin. Until now, glucose levels had to be calculated indirectly, based on a comparison between Raman signals and a reference measurement of blood glucose levels.

While more work is needed to develop the technology into a user-friendly device, this advance shows that a Raman-based sensor for continuous glucose monitoring could be feasible, says Peter So, a professor of biological and mechanical engineering at MIT.

"Today, diabetes is a global epidemic," says So, who is one of the senior authors of the study and the director of MIT's Laser Biomedical Research Center. "If there were a good method for continuous glucose monitoring, one could potentially think about developing better management of the disease."

Sung Hyun Nam of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in Seoul is also a senior author of the study, which appears today in Science Advances. Jeon Woong Kang, a research scientist at MIT, and Yun Sang Park, a research staff member at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, are the lead authors of the paper.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 28 2020, @06:30PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 28 2020, @06:30PM (#950156)

    Using litmus paper.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday January 28 2020, @07:52PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 28 2020, @07:52PM (#950198) Journal

    I could say that needle pricks have trouble pissing on target.

    But the real reason the piss paper test fell out of favor is that it gives you a blood glucose reading that is now quite old . . . or almost useless, but better than nothing. I would suppose the piss glucose level would represent the blood glucose level at the point there the piss begins its journey from kidney to bladder.

    The test performed on a drop of blood gives you your immediately current blood glucose level.

    A few decades ago we had to take care of my diabetic child. It was an education. The children's hospital was amazing at educating us.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday January 28 2020, @09:35PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Tuesday January 28 2020, @09:35PM (#950246) Journal

    Actually, it is still done as part of "dipstick" UAs.

    The issue, though, is that the kidneys won't start passing glucose until one is seriously hyperglycemic. Or pregnant, or in very late stage kidney disease. (More properly the glucose does indeed enter the nephron but should pass back near enough 100% in the proximal loop and now you know as much as you did before if you don't know kidney anatomy). In all three cases there is a breakdown where glucose doesn't reabsorb properly as it should within the kidney. Urine should normally be glucose free.

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