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Monitoring

If you don't routinely check and record your levels, work with your diabetes care team –your doctor, diabetes educator and any physician specialists – to create a self-monitoring schedule. They can help you identify the target blood glucose levels you should maintain.

It's also important to maintain long-term blood glucose control. An A1C test is one way of judging your blood glucose level over the last 3 months. Your A1C is shown as a percentage between 4-13%. The higher your A1C percentage is, the higher your glucose levels have been over time.

Like the A1C, the term estimated average glucose (eAG) shows an average of your glucose levels over the last few months. The difference is that it's written in mg/dL (like the blood sugar numbers you see on your glucose meter) instead of a percentage.

The American Diabetes Association recommends an A1C below 7% (an eAG of 154 mg/dL); the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists recommends less than 6.5% (an eAG of 140 mg/dL).

While monitoring your blood sugar is an important part of diabetes self-care, it's also necessary to monitor your overall health. Diabetes is the number one cause of adult blindness, kidney failure and lower-limb amputation, and it's a large contributor to heart attacks and strokes. Therefore, you and your diabetes care team will also need to monitor the following:

• Cardiovascular health, as measured by blood pressure and cholesterol levels
• Eye health, which includes yearly dilated eye exams
• Kidney health, using urine and blood testing
• Foot health, which requires regular foot exams by you and your diabetes care team and annual sensory testing