November 19, 2015

New British A1c Values

I had an embarrassing surprise on a diabetes forum lately when I questioned an HbA1c value of 49. The person was from the United Kingdom and I admit that I was not familiar with the change in values. There may be a few other countries that have adopted this, but I have not encountered them as of yet. Australia apparently has converted to the new system.

The InDependent Diabetes Trust (IDDT) is the organization that developed the new system. This table is from their newsletter.

The relationship between the current HbA1c and the new measurements will be:
HbA1c (DCCT)
Current measurement (%)
HbA1c (IFCC)
Measurement from October 2011 (mmol/mol)
6 42
7 53
8 64
9 75
10 86
11 97
12 108
13 119

I need to thank Tom Ross for the information he had in his November 12, 2015 blog. His information starts at “More risk-assessment!” which is a ways down the blog. Tom does give us a converter link and this will help us convert to the new standards of HbA1c readings. I would urge you to read Tom's blog.

This means that those of us in the United States will now have another conversion to make to understand when seeing information from some other countries.

No comments: