Risk scores in ischaemic heart disease patients with type 2 diabetes, Isfahan, Iran

Objective - The aim of this study was to determine a simple risk score for undiagnosed ischaemic heart disease (IHD) in patients with type 2 diabetes. Methods - A sample of 2 101 patients was taken from case records of diabetic patients held by the Isfahan Endocrine and Metabolism Research Centre outpatient clinic. The study was performed cross-sectionally. The following risk factors were analysed for developing a risk score among the patients: sex, age, duration of diabetes, body mass index, blood pressure, glycosylated haemoglobin, fasting blood sugar, cholesterol, triglycerides and smoking. A logistic regression model was used to compute the odds ratio (OR) for risk factors for diagnosed IHD. ORs of the models were used to assign a score value for each variable and the composite diabetes risk score was calculated as the sum of those scores. Results - 66% of patients were women and 36.8% patients had IHD. ROC curves were constructed to identify the optimum discriminator (>= 54 from 100) of diabetic patients for determining IHD. Sensitivity and specificity for predicting IHD were calculated for different cut-off scores. The sensitivity and specificity for IHD were around 64% and 57%, respectively. Conclusion - The present study focused on predicting ischaemic heart diseases in type 2 diabetes from factors that are easy to measure with non-invasive methods known to be associated with risk of IHD, using a risk score.