Analysis of pain and blood volume in capillary blood sampling on finger and arm

Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2005:2005:2520-2. doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2005.1616981.

Abstract

Alternative site capillary blood sampling may be a useful way to reduce pain during skin puncture. The present study made quantitative measurement of pain and blood volume for both finger and arm sampling in 58 normal female subjects. Visual pain measures resulted in 1/5~1/3 pain scores for arm relative to finger sampling. Deeper puncture thru skin on arm caused more pain to some degree. 399/464 samples from arm were larger than 0.5muL of blood volume. Modern glucose meters require 0.3~0.5muL of capillary blood for test, thus the success rate of blood sugar test was estimated to be 86%. Since daily sampling on finger could cause serious stress for the diabetes due to pain, arm sampling may be a good alternative. However, resampling followed by test failure should be considered.