Choosing your Diabetes Monitor I have an Alpha Track (whoa expensive strips!) Bayer Contour ect

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Onre

Onre

Member Since 2017
So I was in a hurry to get a monitor the Alpha Track kit was a good deal until I ran out of strips and I see they are $50.00 for 50 strips. I didn't know to check that. I don't want to continue with the Alpha track due to the expense.I already have two meters for humans one is several years old that is a One Touch Mini or a newer Bayer Contour. Would any of the meters I have work? What do I need to know about them? It looks like the test strips are cheap for both of them but are they ok for cats?

I see Relion being suggested on the board now will it be any better than the human meters I have now. Can human meters be calibrated for pets?
 
Those human meters you have will be fine, most of us use the human meters and the protocols and guidelines used here are are designed for use with the human meters.

Also, I believe you can use the freestyle lite strips with the alphatrak and you will get the human calibrated reading. I think.
 
Onre said:
Would any of the meters I have work? What do I need to know about them?
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They will work fine....the important thing to know is your "take action" number.....On the AlphaTrak it's when they drop below 68....on a human meter it's when they drop below 50

One thing you need to consider before choosing either one that you already have is the cost of the replacement strips for them and the sample size required for testing!! The reason so many of us use the Relion Confirm or Micro from WalMart is that the strips are affordable ($35.88/100) and take the tiniest sample size. A lot of human meters replacement strips are just as costly as the AT
 
I have both a freestyle lite and a freestyle precision neo and the strips are very different, a neo is wider and wouldn't fit in the lite meter if tried to. So if a freestyle lite is same size and works with the alphatrack then there is no way that a neo would fit it.
 
The strips for the Neo are incredibly cheap but I just read they need more blood so I won't go for that.
 
For some reason I though those Relion strips were a lot more cheaper than the freestyle lite strips I'm using. Maybe I was never actually converting the dollars and just thinking numbers. 0.74 cdn is google translated to 0.51 usd which is stillmore than 0.3588 per strip. Or maybe I'm thinking someone was getting good deals through internet on them.
 
Yeah, the Neo needs o.6 microlitre drop and freestyle lite and i believe alphatrak only need 0.3. But actually the difference is way more I found. The lite seems to work for the tiniest of blood drops on the ear, as long as its a bead of blood and not just a blood smear. I think I got 4 errors on 16 attempts with the neo. Half of those errors were using the $2.50 cdn per strips used to measure ketones. Which is the reason I got the meter. Costs more to measure ketones but a lot simpler and convenient to test when you want, rather than stalk the cat for hours hoping he hoes to the litter box.
 
babyBoo said:
For some reason I though those Relion strips were a lot more cheaper than the freestyle lite strips I'm using
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You've got it right!! The Relion strips are .3588 cents (US) each.....where the AT strips are around $1 each, so the Relion is 66% cheaper

There's also a Relion Prime meter that takes a larger sample size (and some people complain about lots of meter errors)...the strips for the Prime are only $9 for 50 (so .18 cents each)
 
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