Inpatient hyperglycaemia can be an indicator of diabetes mellitus: Study

UK: A new study published in Diabetic Medicine suggests that the number of people who need to be screened to identify an individual who may have diabetes reduces as the screening threshold based on the peak in-hospital glucose concentration increases.

When brought to the hospital, many people with undiagnosed diabetes develop hyperglycemia. Inpatient hyperglycemia can be a sign of diabetes, but it can also be a simple stress reaction. As a result, Andrew J. Farmer and colleagues' study describes the extent to which an in-hospital maximum recorded random glucose test predicts the necessity for an in-hospital (or subsequent) HbA1c assessment to look for undetected diabetes.

HbA1c, blood glucose, age, and gender were gathered from all people admitted to a UK NHS trust hospital between 1 January 2019 and 31 December 2020. The analysis was limited to patients who were registered with a GP practice that utilizes the trusted laboratory and had at least some tests ordered by those practices since 2008. Individuals were classified based on their maximum in-hospital glucose measurement, and the number of those with HbA1c levels of 48 mmol/mol (6.5 percent) prior to the index hospitalization, as well as during and after admission, was reported. An estimated proportion of people in each blood glucose stratum who did not have a follow-up HbA1c were found to have undiagnosed diabetes.