Krabbe CEM, et al. – This investigation was undertaken to compare the risk predicting abilities of diabetes risk scores and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) for incident type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) among participants of the Study of Health in Pomerania (SHIP) in a 5–year follow–up period. Findings showed that the risk of T2DM in SHIP was well predicted by all diabetes risk scores and the HbA1c. Additionally, which model or biomarker should be used was driven by its context of use, e.g. the practicability, implementation of interventions and availability of measurement.

Methods

• Researchers studied 2,916 subjects (20 to 81 years) from the Study of Health in Pomerania (SHIP) in a 5-year follow-up period.
• Diabetes risk scores included the Cooperative Health Research in the Region of Augsburg (KORA) base model, the Danish diabetes risk score and the Data from the Epidemiological Study on the Insulin Resistance syndrome (D.E.S.I.R) clinical risk score.
• They also evaluated the performance of each of the diabetes risk scores and the HbA1c for 5-year risk of T2DM by the area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve (AUC) and calibration plots.

Results

• According to findings, in SHIP, the incidence of T2DM was 5.4% (n=157) in the 5-year follow-up period.
• Researchers noted that diabetes risk scores and HbA1c achieved AUCs ranging from 0.76 for the D.E.S.I.R. clinical risk score to 0.82 for the KORA base model.
• Data indicated that for diabetes risk scores, the discriminative ability was lower for the age group 55 to 74 years.
• In addition, results revealed that, for HbA1c, the discriminative ability also decreased for the group 55 to 74 years while it was stable in the age group 30 to 64 years old.