When it comes to blood glucose detection, many people's first reaction is to take finger blood. For people who need to test their blood sugar levels regularly, taking blood from their fingers many times a day is a painful process. Now, American researchers are studying the method of measuring blood sugar with tears, hoping to replace blood test one day. The research report was published in the latest issue of analytical chemistry. Researchers at the University of Michigan in the United States experimented with 12 white rabbits. They found that the glucose level in white rabbit tears was related to the blood glucose level.
In theory, blood glucose levels can be determined by measuring glucose levels in tears. According to the report, the glucose content in white rabbit tears is one-fifth to one-thirtieth of that in blood. Therefore, researchers must make enough sensitive test paper to measure blood glucose level with only a small amount of tears. The researchers said that the white rabbit experiment showed that the level of glucose in the tear was related to the blood sugar level. Next, they would test further in other animal, then test it on healthy people and diabetes.
According to the statistics of the American Diabetes Association, there are about 25 million 800 thousand diabetes patients in the United States, and about 7 million people are not diagnosed. George Grunberg, an American Society of clinical endocrinologists, said that diabetes has a high level of glucose in the blood. Some people are because the pancreas stops insulin secretion. Some people are unable to control their blood sugar levels because their body cells are resistant to insulin. Some diabetes patients need to check blood glucose levels regularly, "two times, three times, four times or even ten times a day, because blood sugar levels change quite rapidly in one day".
Like researchers at the University of Michigan, researchers at Arizona State University and Mayo Clinic are also overcoming the difficulty of measuring blood glucose in tears. Jeffrey label, a biomedical engineer at Arizona State University, said their goal is to develop a blood glucose test paper that extracts a small amount of tears by touching the whites of the eyes. Label said the idea of measuring blood sugar with tears came into being in 1937.
Tears pose three major challenges for researchers: evaporation, low glucose concentration and low amount. In addition, researchers must also pay attention to the safety of the detection process and not let the test paper stimulate the eyes. Grunberg also said that tear detection may never replace blood detection, because rabbit experiments show that the correlation between glucose in tears and blood glucose in each rabbit is different. Therefore, even if tear blood glucose detection technology is applied to humans one day, each user must calibrate the blood glucose meter first.
