Assessment of a new visual test strip for blood glucose monitoring.

We have compared the performance of the newly available blood glucose test strip, Visidex (Ames Division, Miles Laboratories Ltd., Stoke Poges, Slough, United Kingdom), designed for visual reading, with that of the already available BM-Test-Glycemie 20-800 [Boehringer Mannheim Corporation (London) Ltd., Lewes, East Sussex, United Kingdom]. The new test strip proved slightly less accurate over a wide range of blood glucose values and was less precise at normal and high glucose values. The color of the Visidex faded more rapidly on storage and errors in timing of the blood strip reaction caused greater inaccuracies. At present BM-Test-Glycemie 20-800 remains the visual glucose test strip of choice, although even with this strip there was a wide scatter of values when used by patients.