Portable blood glucose meters as a means of monitoring blood glucose concentrations in dogs and cats with diabetes mellitus.

The use of portable blood glucose meters (PBGM) has become common in veterinary medicine as a rapid means of monitoring animals' blood glucose in a variety of medical conditions. These hand-held monitors allow for diagnostic and therapeutic decisions to be made quickly and relatively inexpensively using only a small amount of blood. Both in conditions resulting in hyperglycemia, such as diabetes mellitus, and in those resulting in hypoglycemia, such as sepsis or the presence of an insulinoma, veterinarians have come to rely on PBGM to provide critical information on the status of their animal patients. In particular, PBGM are frequently used to measure individual blood glucose values in an animal over a period to create a blood glucose curve when evaluating the effectiveness of insulin therapy in diabetic dogs and cats.