Performance of diabetes screening tests: an evaluation study of Iranian diabetes screening program

Type 2 diabetes is a common non-communicable disease that is responsible for about 9% of all deaths and a 25% reduction in life expectancy. However, nearly half of the diabetic patients are not aware of their disease. In this regard, to identify un-known diabetic patients, diabetes screening is of great importance. This study was conducted to evaluate the performance of two commonly used diabetes screening tests that are currently recommended by the Iranian diabetes screening program for (DSP).

The validity of the two diabetes screening tests were measured among 1057 participants who were older than 30 years of age. The studied screening tests included capillary fasting blood glucose (CBG) and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c). The golden standard for measuring the validity of the tests was venous fasting plasma glucose (VPG).

According to the results, the sensitivity of CBG and HbA1c tests was 69.01% and 84.5%, and the specificity of the tests were 95.7% and 79.3%, respectively. Positive and negative predictive values were 53.84% and 97.72% for CBG and 22.72% and 98.61% for HbA1c, respectively. The recommended cut points for CBG and HbA1c were 116.5 mg/dl and 7.15%, respectively. Using these values as the new cut points, sensitivity and specificity of CBG and HbA1c changed to 80.30% and 89.10%, and 77.50% and 94.20%, respectively.

Compared to several other countries, the performance of Iranian DSP is relatively better. The Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve suggested new cut points for significantly better performance of DSP.