an examination of the agreement between self-reported diabetes and paraclinical tests, medical records, and clinical examinations: insights from the shahedieh cohort study, yazd, iran

Introduction: many researchers utilize self-reports to evaluate the prevalence of diseases. however, the accuracy of these self-reports remains uncertain in various studies. the objective of this particular study was to validate self-reported cases of diabetes among adults aged 35-70 years participating in the shahedieh cohort study (shcs). methods: this cross-sectional study was conducted using data from the first phase of shcs during 2015-2017. the study included 1000 iranian adults aged 35-70 years. the gold standard for diabetes was determined by measuring fasting blood sugar (fbs) and evaluating the history of treatment and use of diabetes medications. to assess self-report validity, various statistical indices such as sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values (npvs), accuracy, positive likelihood ratio (lr+), negative likelihood ratio (lr-) and auc were used. the agreement between self-reported diabetes and the gold standard was assessed using kappa statistics. all statistical analyses were performed using spss version 13 and r 4.3.1 software. results: the study findings indicated that the prevalence of diabetes was 18% according to self-report and 19.9% according to the gold standard measurement. the self-report accuracy was 95.67%. there was perfect agreement (kappa=0.86) between the self-report and gold standard criteria. the auc, sensitivity and specificity of self-reported diabetes were 0.937, 93.82% and 96.08%, respectively. additionally, the results suggested that the self-report of diabetes was more valid in individuals with a normal body mass index (bmi) and without a family history of diabetes in first-degree relatives. conclusion: the results showed that in the absence of diabetes control programs, self-report of diabetes is reliable and recommended.