Survey of diabetes risk assessment tools: concepts, structure and performance Diabetes/Metabolism Research and Reviews, 04/25/2012

Thoopputra T et al. – There is a trend of increasing availability of diabetes prediction tools with the existing risk assessment tools being generally short questionnaire aiming for ease of use in clinical practice. The overall performance of existing tools showed moderate to high accuracy in their predictive performance.

• An electronic search of the EMBASE, MEDLINE, Cochrane library supplemented by a manual search was performed from 1995-2010.

• The search retrieved a total of 2168 articles reporting diabetes risk assessment tools which after culling produced 41 tools developed in 22 countries, with the majority (n = 26) developed in North America and Europe.
• All are short questionnaires of 2-16 questions incorporating common variables including age, gender, waist circumference, BMI, family history of diabetes, history of hypertension or antihypertensive medications.
• While scoring format and cut-offs point are diverse between questionnaires, overall accuracy value range of 40-97%, 24-86% and 62-87% were reported for sensitivity, specificity and receiver operating characteristic curve respectively.