New calculator for diabetes risk

Following on from diabetes news reports, it appears that British experts have created a new online calculator to help people predict their risk of type 2 diabetes development .
To create the software, a research team studied the medical records of over 2.5 million people over a 15 year period. The team identified nine significant risk factors for diabetes . These included ethnicity, body mass index, smoking, socioeconomic level, family history, age, hypertensio, use of steroids and history of cardiovascular disease.
To reach their conclusions, the team from Nottingham University calculated how important each of these factors was and created an algorithm to predict ten year risk of type 2 diabetes . The calculator can be viewed at Qdscore.org .
Dr. Hippisley-Cox, lead author, reportedly said: “Those are the interventions that have been tested. If you play around with the obesity measure, you can see how your risk will change if you lose weight .”