Diabetes is a disease that is becoming very common now. As per the American Diabetes Association estimates, approximately 6.2 million people have diabetes but have not been diagnosed. Another 41 million persons are pre-diabetic and could become diabetic if precautions are not taken. If diabetes is not diagnosed for an extended period, it can lead to various complications. Diabetes can be fatal or lead to a coma in extreme cases. Thus, you should be aware if you are at risk of becoming diabetic.
The number of persons susceptible to diabetes is alarmingly high. The physicians wanted a screening method that could be used by the patients to easily get an idea of whether they were prone to this disease. This lead to the birth of the Diabetes Risk Calculator.
The aim of the Diabetes Risk Calculator was to help the public to find out if they were at a risk of having pre-diabetes or were undiagnosed diabetics. If the outcome of the task was that they were at risk, they could proactively consult their physician. This, in turn, would help in diagnosis and consequently in controlling the ailment.
The Diabetes Risk Calculator is a “simple, self-administered, paper-based screening tool”. It contains several questions, the answers of which are usually known by the person who is answering them. These questions relate to the person’s age, height, race or ethnicity, waist circumference, hypertension, family history, exercise and the occurrence of gestational diabetes.
The Diabetes Risk Calculator uses tree analysis to determine whether a person has a
1. High risk for undiagnosed diabetes or prediabetes,
2. High risk for prediabetes, or
3. Risk for neither undiagnosed diabetes nor prediabetes
The answers to the various questions are mapped in the decision tree as a series of branch points. Depending upon these answers, the branches lead to different terminal nodes. These terminal nodes denote the susceptibility of the person to diabetes. You can find these diabetes risk calculators at various medical websites. It is advisable to determine your risk at the very earliest.