Objective
To develop a clinical risk scoring system for identifying adolescents with dysglycemia (prediabetes or diabetes) who need further confirmatory testing and to determine whether the addition of non-fasting tests would improve the prediction of dysglycemia.
Study Design
A sample of 176 overweight and obese adolescents (10 – 17 years) had a history/physical exam, a 2-h oral glucose tolerance test, and non-fasting tests [hemoglobin A1c, 1-h glucose challenge test (GCT), and random glucose test] performed. Given the low number of children with diabetes, we created several risk scoring systems combining the clinical characteristics with non-fasting tests for identifying adolescents with dysglycemia and compared the test performance.
Results
Sixty percent of participants were white and 32% were black; 39.2% had prediabetes and 1.1% had diabetes. A basic model including demographics, body mass index percentile, family history of diabetes, and acanthosis nigricans had reasonable test performance [area under the curve (AUC), 0.75; 95% confidence interval (95% CI), 0.68 – 0.82]. The addition of random glucose (AUC, 0.81; 95% CI, 0.75 – 0.87) or 1-h GCT (AUC, 0.82; 95% CI, 0.75 – 0.88) to the basic model significantly improved the predictive capacity, but the addition of hemoglobin A1c did not (AUC, 0.76; 95% CI, 0.68 – 0.83). The clinical score thresholds to consider for the basic plus random glucose model are total score cutoffs of 60 or 65 (sensitivity 86% and 65% and specificity 60% and 78%, respectively) and for the basic plus 1-h GCT model are total score cutoffs of 50 or 55 (sensitivity 87% and 73% and specificity 59% and 76%, respectively).
Conclusions
Pending a validation in additional populations, a risk score combining the clinical characteristics with non-fasting test results may be a useful tool for identifying children with dysglycemia in the primary care setting.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.