Gingival crevicular blood for assessment of blood glucose in diabetic patients.

In this study 50 patients with diabetes mellitus had gingival crevicular blood from periodontal probing collected in small plastic pipettes. The pipettes transferred the crevicular blood to a non-wipe glucose self-monitoring instrument. At the same time, finger-stick capillary blood measurements were analyzed in the same glucose self-monitoring instrument, and venous blood was collected for measurement in a laboratory glucose analyzer. Each laboratory measurement was corrected from a serum glucose value to a whole blood glucose value by a function of the patient's hematocrit. This corrected glucose value allowed direct comparison of the laboratory measurement to the intraoral and finger-stick whole blood measurements. The patient blood glucose concentrations ranged from 59 mg/dl to 366 mg/dl. The gingival crevicular blood exhibited a correlation of r = 0.975 (P < .0001) to the corrected laboratory standard measurement, with a mean prediction error (bias) of -4.11 mg/dl and a root mean square error (precision) of 17.43 mg/dl. The finger-stick blood had a correlation of r = 0.983 (P < .0001) to the corrected laboratory standard, with a mean prediction error of 4.65 mg/dl and a root mean square error of 14.48 mg/dl. The American Diabetic Association recommends that the prediction error of blood glucose monitoring devices fall within 15% of the laboratory standard. Using this criterion 92% of the gingival crevicular measurements and 90% of the finger-puncture measurements fell within 15% of the laboratory value.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)