Objective: To develop a New Chinese Diabetes Risk Score for screening undiagnosed type 2 diabetes in China.
Research design and methods: Data from the China National Diabetes and Metabolic Disorders Study conducted from June 2007 to May 2008 comprising 16,525 men and 25,284 women aged 20-74 years were analyzed. Undiagnosed type 2 diabetes was detected based on fasting plasma glucose ≥7.0 mmol/L or 2-h plasma glucose ≥11.1 mmol/L in people without a prior history of diabetes. β-Coefficients derived from a multiple logistic regression model predicting the presence of undiagnosed type 2 diabetes were used to calculate the New Chinese Diabetes Risk Score. The performance of the New Chinese Diabetes Risk Score was externally validated in two studies in Qingdao: one is prospective with follow-up from 2006 to 2009 (validation 1) and another cross-sectional conducted in 2009 (validation 2).
Results: The New Chinese Diabetes Risk Score includes age, sex, waist circumference, BMI, systolic blood pressure, and family history of diabetes. The score ranges from 0 to 51. The area under the receiver operating curve of the score for undiagnosed type 2 diabetes was 0.748 (0.739-0.756) in the exploratory population, 0.725 (0.683-0.767) in validation 1, and 0.702 (0.680-0.724) in validation 2. At the optimal cutoff value of 25, the sensitivity and specificity of the score for predicting undiagnosed type 2 diabetes were 92.3 and 35.5%, respectively, in validation 1 and 86.8 and 38.8% in validation 2.
Conclusions: The New Chinese Diabetes Risk Score based on nonlaboratory data appears to be a reliable screening tool to detect undiagnosed type 2 diabetes in Chinese population.