Hello everyone,

It strikes me that many of us may be sometimes perplexed and confused
by the international  differences in the units used in reporting test
data, especially for measurement of such things as blood glucose
levels. If it may be of assistance, here is a site maintanined at  the
University of North Carolina that sets forth factors to be used in
converting a broad spectrum of U.S. clinical data to SI (standard
international) units.

http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/scales/clinical_data.html

As most of you probably know, most chemistry results in the U.S. are
reported in units of mg/dl, or mg/100mL. SI units report
concentrations in terms of molarity (M/L, mM/L, or muM/L)... sorry, no
greek fonts on this computer  that will come through... ;-) The site
to which I have referred you makes the conversion much less tedious
for anyone desiring to calulate equivalence in terms of SI units, by
providing a factor which can be multiplied by the data reported in the
conventional U.S. system.... Thus, to convert a U.S. measure of BG in
terms of mg/dl, you would multiply by  the factor of 0.0555 to get
mmol/L.

I hope this is helpful to some of you who may have always wondered
about the differences in the international systems in use that
sometimes become apparent from some of the posts that appear here on
asd.

Actually, it was Alan who started me thinking about this today, when I
saw his post to Amy about what has appeared on asd.uk. That started me
thinking about these differences in what I see in that group, where I
sometimes lurk,  and on here.

Thanks for the bone, Alan... It was great chewing!   ;-)

Will, T2