Background: Diabetes has emerged as an important risk factor for COVID-19 adverse outcomes during hospitalization. We investigated whether the measurement of glycated albumin (GA) may be useful in detecting newly diagnosed diabetes during COVID-19 hospitalization.
Methods: In this cross-sectional test accuracy study we evaluated HCPA Biobank data and samples from consecutive in-patients, from 30 March 2020 to 20 December 2020. ROC curves were used to analyse the performance of GA to detect newly diagnosed diabetes (patients without a previous diagnosis of diabetes and admission HbA1c ≥6.5%).
Results: A total of 184 adults (age 58.6 ± 16.6years) were enrolled, including 31 with newly diagnosed diabetes. GA presented AUCs of 0.739 (95% CI 0.642-0.948) to detect newly diagnosed diabetes. The GA cut-offs of 19.0% was adequate to identify newly diagnosed diabetes with high specificity (85.0%) but low sensitivity (48.4%).
Conclusions: GA showed good performance to identify newly diagnosed diabetes and may be useful for identifying adults with the condition in COVID-19-related hospitalization.
Copyright: © 2024 Chume et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.