Validity of Finnish diabetes risk score in Turkish population and developing a predictive model for Type 2 diabetes mellitus

Background and Objectives: Diabetes is a major health problem in turkey as wellas all over the world and its prevalence is increasing. The aim of this study is toevaluate the validity of the Finnish Diabetes Risk Score (FINDRISC) in Turkishpopulation and develop a Turkish Diabetes Prediction (TDP) model.Methods: The participants of the Turkey Chronic Diseases and Risk Factorsstudy-2011 (TCDRF) were followed up through electronic health records until2017 for incident type 2 diabetes (t2dm, ICD codes: E10, E11, E13, E14). Afterexcluding 4997 people with a diabetes history and 1231 with missing data; a totalof 12249 participants older than 14 years of age were included in the analysis. Theperformance of FINDRISC in predicting t2dm was evaluated according to c-index.We identified the final variables for the TDP model using backward stepwiselogistic regression.Results: Out of 12249 participants (mean age: 40±16.7, women: 53%); 505developed t2dm within six years (cumulative incidence rate: 4.1%). The c-indexof the FINDRISC was 0.75 (95% confidence interval: 0.73-0.77) with sensitivityand specificity of 78.4% and 59%. TDP model identified age (odds ratio: 1.02, 95%CI: 1.01-1.03), female gender (OR:1.48, 95% CI:1.17-1.86), university graduation(OR:1.91, 95% CI:1.24-2.94), BMI>30kg/m2 (OR:1.89, 95% CI:1.33-2.70), waistcircumference (OR:1.03, 95% CI:1.02-1.03), having hypertension (OR:1.70, 95%CI:1.34-2.15), impaired fasting glucose (OR:1.73, 95% CI:1.40-2.13) and familyhistory of diabetes (OR:1.40, 95% CI:1.15-1.71) as significant predictors fort2dm. The c-index of TDP model was 0.77 (95% ci: 0.75 to 0.79) with sensitivity,specificity, positive and negative predictive values of 66.7%, 75.3%, 10.4% and98.1%, respectively.Conclusions: FINDRISC had good validity in Turkish population. Compared with FINDRISC, TDP model showed similar results in terms of model performance.TDP model had a good predictive ability for the population who had a low risk ofdeveloping t2dm.