Glycome Atlas
concept
Also known as glycated serum protein, glycated albumin
Plain-language answer
Fructosamine is a measure of how much sugar has attached to proteins in the blood, mainly albumin. Because these serum proteins are replaced faster than red blood cells, fructosamine reflects average blood sugar over a shorter window, roughly the past two to three weeks.12
Fructosamine is useful when a shorter-term view of blood sugar is needed, or when the standard HbA1c test is unreliable because of conditions that change red blood cell lifespan. It helps track recent changes in glucose control, such as after a treatment adjustment.1
Technical detail
Fructosamine denotes the pool of stable Amadori-type ketoamine adducts on serum proteins, predominantly albumin, and serves as a glycation biomarker that integrates glycemia over the roughly two to three week turnover of these proteins.1
Glucose reacts non-enzymatically with lysine residues of circulating serum proteins, forming Schiff bases that rearrange to stable fructosamine ketoamines. Because albumin and other serum proteins have a shorter half-life than hemoglobin, the assay reports a moving average of glycemia spanning approximately the previous two to three weeks, a shorter window than HbA1c.1
Fructosamine is used as an intermediate-term marker of glycemic control, particularly when a rapid picture of recent glucose exposure is required or when HbA1c is confounded by altered erythrocyte survival or hemoglobin variants.1
Human relevance
Fructosamine provides a shorter-window measure of average glycemia that complements HbA1c and is useful when red-cell-based measurement is unreliable.1
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