We found no study that has been conducted to assess the predictive value of a combination of the risk factors for microalbuminuria. The risk of developing microal-buminuria in type 2 diabetes depends on several deter-minants. Risk determinants include age, gender, body mass index (BMI), duration of diabetes, age at diagnosis, glycemic control, blood pressure control, dislipidemia and smoking [10-12]. If several of these factors could be used to develop a predictor score with a reasonable abil-ity to predict microalbuminuria, all type 2 diabetes pa-tients could be screened for early detection and early treatment. The aims of this study were to develop and validate a risk scoring scheme for the prediction micro-albuminuria in type 2 diabetes patients.
2. METHODS
We conducted a case-control study analogue design in 4 diabetes clinics in Thailand, including 3 units in com-munity hospitals, and 1 unit in tertiary hospital. Data from type 2 diabetes patients who had undergone treat-ment at community hospitals were used to develop a prediction model; the subjects represented “the deriva-tion set”. Data from type 2 diabetes patients who had undergone treatment at tertiary hospital were used to evaluate the performance of the model obtained from the derivation set of subjects; they represented “the valida-tion set”. The study was approved by the Ethical Review Committee for Research in Human subjects of the Thai Ministry of Public Health and the Bangkok Metropolitan Medical College and Vajira Hospital.