BrDMrisc – Online Brazilian Risk Score for Incident Type 2 Diabetes – ELSA-Brasil Cohort

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To describe the Brazilian Diabetes Risk Score (BrDMrisc), an online calculator for estimating the risk of developing diabetes in 10 years, comparing it to other commonly used screening approaches to identify high-risk of future diabetes. METHODS: BrDMrisc is derived from 7.4-year follow-up data from ELSA-Brasil,  a contemporary Brazilian cohort. Risk functions to predict future diabetes were based on socioeconomic, lifestyle, clinical, and laboratory variables, many of which are incorporated as continuous variables on a training sample including half of the analyzed cohort.  We used ELSA-Brasil participant baseline data and incident diabetes cases detected during follow-up on the other half to compare the predictive capacity of BrDMrisc against traditional pre-diabetes screening strategies. RESULTS: BrDMrisc’s 27 risk functions offer versatility to the online app, enabling estimates based on differing combinations of clinical and laboratory findings, which present more favorable diagnostic properties than other recommended approaches. For example, the BrDMrisc function based on clinical data plus fasting glucose, when compared with detection using solely the presence of impaired fasting glucose (≥ 100 mg/dL), identified a more manageable fraction (20.0% versus 40.6%) of the population as high risk, with those identified as presenting a two-fold risk of developing diabetes (28.5% versus 17.1%). CONCLUSIONS: BrDMrisc diabetes risk calculator, based on data from a contemporary Brazilian cohort, is readily available online, versatile, and presents generally more favorable diagnostic properties than other commonly used screening strategies.