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Screening with HbA1c identifies only one in two individuals with diagnosis of prediabetes at oral glucose tolerance test: findings in a real-world Caucasian population

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Abstract

Objective

Discordance between HbA1c and OGTT in screening pre-diabetes may occur because of lack of laboratory standardization, distinct underlying pathophysiological processes or different ethnicity. We evaluated HbA1c efficacy for screening OGTT-defined IFG and IGT conditions in a large Caucasian population using the newly revised IFCC protocol.

Research design and methods

A total of 501 consecutive subjects were screened for pre-diabetic conditions with OGTT with 75 g of glucose. Testing for HbA1c, lipid profile and fasting insulin levels was also performed. For detecting differences between continuous variables, ANOVA followed by Tukey’s honestly significant difference (HSD) post hoc test was used. Logistic regression and ROC curve analysis were also performed for assessing HbA1c screening efficacy.

Results

ROC curve analysis showed that optimal HbA1c cut-off for detecting IFG was 5.6 % (sensitivity of 78 % and specificity of 63 %), while for IGT, the optimal cut-off was 5.9 % (sensitivity of 46 % and specificity of 84 %), with AUCs < 0.8. Screening with HbA1c identified 53.4 % of the 193 patients with IFG and/or IGT diagnosed at OGTT. As regards surrogate markers of insulin resistance, we observed a trend towards higher values of HOMA-IR and lower QUICKI values in subjects with IFG than in those with IGT. Patients with pre-diabetes at both tests had similar values of HOMA and QUICKI, compared with those with altered OGTT only.

Conclusions

IFCC-aligned HbA1c assay proved scarcely effective in detecting IFG and/or IGT in a large Caucasian population, identifying only half of the patients with abnormal OGTT. Moreover, adding HbA1c screening to OGTT may be of little benefit in identifying subjects with a worse metabolic profile.

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Conflict of interest

Nino Cristiano Chilelli, Chiara Cosma, Eugenio Ragazzi, Silvia Burlina, Martina Zaninotto, Mario Plebani and Annunziata Lapolla declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical disclosure

Ethics approval was obtained from the institutional review board of the local Ethical Committee.

Human and animal rights disclosure

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.

Informed consent disclosure

Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Unit of Metabolic Diseases, Department of Medicine, University of Padova, Via Giustiniani, 2, 35100, Padua, Italy

    Nino Cristiano Chilelli, Silvia Burlina & Annunziata Lapolla

  2. Unit of Laboratory Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Padova, Padua, Italy

    Chiara Cosma, Martina Zaninotto & Mario Plebani

  3. Department of Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences, University of Padova, Padua, Italy

    Eugenio Ragazzi

Authors
  1. Nino Cristiano Chilelli
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  2. Chiara Cosma
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  7. Annunziata Lapolla
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Correspondence to Annunziata Lapolla.

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Chilelli, N.C., Cosma, C., Ragazzi, E. et al. Screening with HbA1c identifies only one in two individuals with diagnosis of prediabetes at oral glucose tolerance test: findings in a real-world Caucasian population. Acta Diabetol 51, 875–882 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00592-014-0639-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00592-014-0639-2

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