I’m happy to announce SugarStats now has experimental mmol/l support!

Mmol/l support

I wish we could have released it at the private-BETA launch but it had to wait.

To some of you this might not matter at all, most likely if you’re in the U.S. then it doesn’t. In the U.S. the standard for measuring glucose levels is in mg/dL and stands for milligrams/deciliter.

But everywhere else in the world another standard is used which is called mmol/l. mmol/l stands for millimoles/liter and is the world standard for measuring blood glucose.

Mg/dl to mmol/l conversion

Along with general support we’ve integrated mg/dl to mmol/l conversion and vise-versa. So if you’ve been BETA testing and having to enter your readings in mg/dl but really have them taken in mmol/l, now you can convert any existing entries.

All you have to do is go to your “lists & settings” page, go to personal details and select which one you’d like from the glucose scale drop-down box.

Once you update it will automatically convert to the opposite scale.

Conversion process

Note though that the formula we used for conversion isn’t particularly complex, we used a very common method in which you simply divide(or multiply) by 18. So there might be a slight margin of error on some of your entries, but for the most part it is pretty precise.

All of you BETA testing can us it immediately, feel free to drop by the forum / contact support if you need help or have questions.

Medical news today has an excellent article up regarding the effects on embryonic cells high blood glucose has which affects pregnant women.

What I’m curious is how this (or if) can turn into possible gestational diabetes in women? Studies like this just put the spotlight even more on regulated glucose levels, especially if its affecting the development of fetus’.

“Over the past several years, Joslin Investigator Mary R. Loeken, Ph.D., and her colleagues at Joslin Diabetes Center have unlocked several mysteries behind what puts women with diabetes more at risk of having a child with birth defects. Even though those risks have decreased significantly over the years, thanks in part to advancements at Joslin, women with diabetes still are two to five times more likely than the general population to have a baby with birth defects, especially of the heart and spinal cord, organs that form within the first few weeks of pregnancy.”

They discovered the protein called glucose transporter 2 (Glut2) enabled high amounts of glucose to be easily transfered into embryonic cells which affects the critical early development stages of fetus’

“Now, in this latest study done in mice, Dr. Loeken and her colleagues have discovered that the protein called glucose transporter 2 (Glut2) makes it possible for the high concentrations of glucose to get into the embryonic cells efficiently when the mother’s blood glucose concentrations are high. Also involved in the study was Rulin Li, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral fellow at Joslin. The study, supported by the National Institutes of Health, will appear in the March print edition of Diabetologia and was published online by the journal.”

They also found that those without the Glut2 gene were protected against deformation in diabetic pregnancies:

“Using mice that lacked Glut2 genes, which were developed by one of the study’s co-authors, Bernard Thorens, Ph.D., of the Center for Integrated Genomics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Joslin researchers found that only embryos carrying normal Glut2 genes developed malformations when the mothers were diabetic, whereas embryos that lacked Glut2 genes were protected from malformations during diabetic pregnancy. “This shows that the high-transport Glut2 transporter was responsible for getting higher concentrations of glucose in the cell and causing the malformations.” The embryos were examined on the 10th day of gestation. The time span in the mice, Dr. Loeken explained, is comparable to about the fourth or fifth weeks of a human pregnancy, which is about the time a woman may discover that she is pregnant.”

Though I’m not sure what the ratio or chances are of a given person having the Glut2 gene, there are 14 other transporter genes as well.

You can read the whole article here: Protein Makes It Possible For High Blood Glucose To Enter Embryonic Cells

Thanks to the feedback of all our testers we’ve gladly had our hands full with things to do. We’ve pushed out a new release that resolved a few bugs that were found and also made small design tweaks and new features such as:

• Nutritional average bug fixed
• Sugar fluctuation bug fixed
• Medication graph and calculation bug fixed
• Remember me feature now works as it should
• Bug fixed regarding settings drop-down list
• Many more minor fixes

mmol/l support coming soon for you guys to test as well. Keep the comments coming!

In the last few days we’ve had some intermittent downtime of our domain and related domain names. Our servers were fine, but it seems that GoDaddy (Our domain registrar) has been having major issues regarding DDoS attacks and an internal software bug related to DST updates to their servers.

Things seem to be back up and running now, we apologize for those of you who experienced this (and if you didn’t, well then nothing to see here folks ). We’re keeping an eye on this along with working on backup solutions to try and make sure this doesn’t happen again.

We were doing a lot of work and tweaking before the private BETA launch, but now with all the great feedback there is even more.

So we decided to add a new category in our blog to tell you all about new developments, major bug fixes and new directions etc. A place where we can get a little more geeky than usual. This way we can get the word out not only to our testers but also give a glimpse to the public at large about new things happening development wise.

So if this is something you’d like to keep up on, make sure you’re subscribed to our RSS feed.

I found an interesting article through joescafe in which a study determined many (1 in 16) T1DM (Type-1 Diabetes Mellitus) did not wake up from hypoglycemia during sleep.

Very disturbing indeed . Some interesting snippets:

“These results suggest that the awakening response to hypoglycemia is impaired in T1DM patients. It appears that awakening forms part of a central nervous system response to hypoglycemia and that failure to awaken increases the risk for T1DM patients to suffer prolonged hypoglycemia.”

In a related perspective Harry Shamoon and Ilan Gabriely, from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, discuss the paper further and conclude although further work is need to investigate the precise mechanisms involved, it “strongly supports and further advances the current notion of T1DM susceptibility to nocturnal hypoglycemia””

Interesting findings. But I must say, being a Type-1 diabetic for 15 years, I’ve woken up from hypoglycemia every time. I say every time because if I didn’t I either wouldn’t be here to type this or I somehow corrected my blood sugar in my sleep . I’ve also met quite a few other Type-1’s that have told me they’ve woken up so I’m curious to know what the personal conditions of the test and its subjects were.

Good to know none-the-less and reinforces much of that said in our 5 tips to keep your glucose levels balanced during sleep post.

Heres a link to the full article: Patients With Type 1 Diabetes Don’t Wake In Response To Hypoglycemia

I just wanted to say a week after launching the private BETA that things are going great and we’re getting some excellent feedback on the system. People are loving it and like what they can do with it. Since announcing the private BETA we’ve more than quadrupled our traffic and unique visitors. Needless to say now we definitely have our hands full

I want to give big thanks to all the people who were willing to test it out for us and give such excellent feedback, we couldn’t of done it without you. Keep the comments coming and posting in the forum.

A cool thing I wanna work on putting up is maybe some “community wide” generic diabetes stats and graphs to put up on the home page, I think this would kinda be cool. Keep an eye out!

After doing some reflection and planning in order to further lower my own HbA1C levels, one thing I found made a bigger improvement over others. Thinking about it now it makes perfect sense. What is it you ask?

This may seem like common sense, you might even say DUH, but it actually takes a bit more organizational skill to actually implement. Thought this will probably benefit the type 1 diabetic the most, it could be valuable for all.

Quite simply it could be one of the easiest ways for a diabetic to lower their HbA1C levels and keep their overall levels in check. Most of our glucose fluctuations happen over the course of the day as we move about, eat meals, exercise etc. But when we sleep we’re doing none of that PLUS you don’t have all the temptations throughout the day that would otherwise affect your glucose levels. (Unless you count those middle of the night snacks )

What this does is basically is give your body a guaranteed 6-9 hours (or however long you sleep) of regulated glucose level with little distractions.

So what does it take to do this? I think it is highly variable between one person to another, but these tips work for me:

• Bedtime Glucose Check – Checking your glucose levels at bedtime (which you might be doing anyway).

• Middle of the night alarm – If you find yourself having trouble, one thing you could do is set an alarm to wake up and test in the middle of the night. Just take note of what it was at, what you ate and what medication you took at bedtime to compare things.

• Adjust medication – Make sure the insulin you take (short or long lasting) will cover you during the night. It would probably be best to consult your doctor.

• Adjust your Food – Keep an eye on what you eat a few hours before going to bed. Depending on the type of foods you at, how many carbs/sugars/fats etc they contained, it could come back to bit you in the middle of the night even if your glucose level at bedtime was good. This would be a good place to consult your dietitian to figure out what will work best for you regarding dinner and evening foods.

• Find the balance – Each body is different and your will respond differently to the foods you eat and medications you take. This really is about knowing yourself and knowing your body. Knowing how certain foods affect you and what affect certain dosages of your medication will have on you. To make this work the best you’ll have to find the right balance to keep a balanced glucose level through the night.

Overall a pretty simple but helpful tip. Be cautious though not to over compensate for any one thing, or you could end up dipping into a bad low during your sleep and you definitely don’t want that.

Just remember the overall goal is this: When you go to bed, make sure you glucose level is where it should be and it stays there through the night until you wake up