Diabetes is a common non-communicable disease which is responsible for about 9% of all deaths and 25% reduction in life expectancy and nearly half of the diabetic patients are not aware of their disease. In this regard, diabetes screening to identify un-known diabetic patients is of great importance.The aims of this study were first to evaluate the performance of two commonly used diabetes screening tests, which are currently used by the Iranian national screening program for diabetes (NSPD).

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... thods Validity of diabetes screening tests among 1057 participants older than 30 years was measured. Screening tests included Capillary fasting blood glucose (CBG) with glucometer and glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c). In addition, the validity of the tests was measured based on venous fasting plasma glucose (VPG) as golden standard test. Results According to the results, the sensitivity of CBG and HbA1c tests were 69.01% and 84.5% and the specificity of the tests were 95.7% and 79.3% respectively. Positive and negative predictive values were 53.84% and 97.72% for CBG and 22.72% and 98.61% for HbA1c respectively. New cut points for CBG (116.5 mg/dl) and HbA1c (7.15%) are obtained. Using these values as new cut points, sensitivity and specificity of CBG raised to 80.30% and decreased 89.10% respectively. Similarly, using 7.15% as cut point of HbA1c test, sensitivity and specificity changed to 77.50% and 94.20% respectively. Conclusions Compared to several other countries, the performance of NSPD is relatively higher. ROC analysis suggested new cut points for significantly better performance of NSPD.