Meter Reports

Whenever Consumer Reports evaluates blood glucose meters, it's big news. Three people already emailed me to ask what I think about the magazine's review. And on Thursday I just got my copy of the September 2008 issue in which the review appears.

With a monthly circulation of about 4 million copies, what Consumer Reports writes about meters matters. This is one of the dozen biggest magazines in the country and the only one that prides itself on its editorial independence in accepting no advertising. And I'm not aware of any other general interest publication that regularly rates our meters.

Its new review rated 13 meters from eight different manufacturers. This is the same number of meters as it rated in its previous review for its August 2005 issue. But the meter market has changed so much in the past three years that almost all of the meters rated in the new review are different.

These numbers of models and manufacturers are important, because that's a small proportion of the number of meter models. My comprehensive directory of blood glucose meters, part 14 of "On-line Diabetes Resources," describes and links almost 100 current blood glucose meters from 34 manufacturers.

Consumer Reports did review at least two meters from the four manufacturers that dominate this market. It evaluated three OneTouch meters from LifeScan, two Accu-Chek meters from Roche, two FreeStyle meters from Abbott, and two Bayer meters (formerly called Ascensia meters). For good measure it included Wal-Mart's inexpensive ReliOn, Nova Biomedical's Nova Max, GenExel-Sein's Duo-Care (a combined meter and blood pressure monitor), and an unspecified TrueTrack meter manufactured by Home Diagnostics.

I would have been much happier with the article if they had been able to include one or more WaveSense Meters from AgaMatrix. The technology of this smaller meter manufacturer seems to be superior in consistency and accuracy.

The magazine also missed the main value meter. US Diagnostics sells the Maxima meter, which uses the least expensive test strips currently available.

Nor did it include the most advanced meter design. Bionime offers the Rightest GM100, which looks and works beautifully, but if Consumer Reports ever heard it, they don't say.

Still, what disturbs me even more is what they don't tell us about how they went about testing the meters. Most people probably think that Consumer Reports does all their testing in-house. But every time I run across one of the magazine's reports on a class of products that I know something about, I not only have serious reservations about their results but also find that the fine print says they farmed out the tested. Worse, they don't say what company did the testing.

This meter report is no exception. All they say about their testing of accuracy and consistency is that they "contracted with an outside laboratory."

More reliable, I think, is the way they went about testing how easy or difficult the meters were to use. For this they used "lay and expert panelists with diabetes."