Risk scores for predicting type 2 diabetes: comparing axes and spades

Excerpt

A recent systematic review of risk prediction tools for identifying individuals at risk for type 2 diabetes identified a total of 46 different studies reporting the derivation of risk models [1]. These scores included diverse types of variables ranging from simple information generally available in health records through to more detailed biochemical and genetic variables. The paper by the Evaluation of Screening and Early Detection Strategies for Type 2 Diabetes and Impaired Glucose Tolerance (DETECT-2) group in this issue of Diabetologia reports the results of an evaluation of a modified version of one of the most widely investigated diabetes risk prediction tools, the Finnish Diabetes risk score [2]. In this paper the variables included in the prediction model were age, BMI, waist circumference, use of blood pressure medication and previous high blood glucose defined as history of gestational diabetes. The authors compare the predictive ability of this new score with that of the original Finnish risk score and a number of other models. The DETECT-2 group’s conclusion was that this new model performed better than existing risk scores as assessed by the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. …