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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.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday January 29 2020, @06:08PM (2 children)
The blood test strips are accurate to within 5%. The subcutaneous sample system is only accurate to within 20%. It should never have been approved.
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(Score: 2) by bd on Wednesday January 29 2020, @10:25PM (1 child)
Maybe I'm mistaken, but for blood glucose meters, the FDA requirement is +/-15 mg/dl accuracy for blood glucose less than 100 mg/dl, and +/- 15% above 100 mg/dl.
And a significant amount of points in your study may actually be outliers (something like 5%, though I didn't read through the statistics).
Only the better blood test strips actually pass these requirements in real life: https://www.diabetestechnology.org/surveillance.shtml [diabetestechnology.org]
Subcutaneous sample systems are a different beast from the technology described in the article. They measure glucose from sources other than capillary blood by definition, leading to impaired accuracy as you correctly describe.
The scientific challenge for optical glucose meters (like the Raman system described in the article) is to differentiate the photons from inside the capillaries from other tissues. If they cannot differentiate, the accuracy will be unacceptible,
which is why no such system has ever worked well enough so far.
If this problem is solved, though, you could get instant continous measurements with Lab-reference accuracy. Such a system would be quite expensive, but you could put it on a patients finger just like the optical blood oxygenation sensors.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 30 2020, @12:23AM
Current test strips are within 5%, are outside patent protection so the price hasn't gone up in decades, at least in Canada, and are far better than the old pee strips. An alternative would be to test breath for ketones, but just for rapid mass screening. By the time your breath smells of ketones you're pretty far and away out of control - but at least it would be a way to catch some of the 50% who have diabetes and don't know. But a blood test takes 15 seconds . What's the big deal of a finger prick anyway? Once a year at an annual checkup? Grow up. Several times a day? You'll get used to it.
If you're afraid of a little pinprick, you're going to freak at regular insulin injections, even though they're less painful than a finger prick:
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