Learn › HbA1c
HbA1c measures the percentage of your haemoglobin that has sugar attached to it. Because red blood cells live around three months, the result reflects your average blood sugar over roughly 8 to 12 weeks — not what you ate this morning.
Reference range used: 4.0–5.6 %. Runs in your browser — nothing is stored.
That is what makes it valuable. A single glucose reading is a snapshot that moves with your last meal, your stress and your sleep. HbA1c is the trend line underneath all of that noise.
Elevated average blood sugar is one of the most consistently studied markers in metabolic health. Because HbA1c drifts slowly, catching it early gives you a long runway to act before it settles into a higher range.
Most laboratories treat below 5.7% as normal, 5.7–6.4% as the prediabetes range, and 6.5% or above as the diabetes threshold. These are widely used clinical cut-offs, but only a doctor can interpret them in your context.
Two scales exist. The IFCC scale (mmol/mol) is common in Europe; the NGSP scale (%) is common in the US. They describe the same thing — 42 mmol/mol is about 6.0%. Make sure you are comparing like with like, because mistaking one for the other makes a normal result look alarming.
Yes. HbA1c is an average, so it can hide meaningful post-meal spikes, and insulin resistance often develops years before HbA1c moves at all. That is why looking at triglycerides, fasting glucose and insulin markers together gives a fuller picture.
Meaningfully, over about 3 months. Anything faster is measurement noise rather than real change.
A single value tells you little on its own. PhisBio Lab reads your whole blood panel and shows how five body systems — including Metabolism — are doing together.
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