Glycated albumin in the detection of diabetes during COVID-19 hospitalization.

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.