HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS		QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s): Year:  Vol:  Page:

This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Purchase Article View Shopping Cart Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Request Permissions Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Lim, T.-O. Articles by Hamid, M. A. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Lim, T.-O. Articles by Hamid, M. A. Social Bookmarking                What's this?

Bimodality in Blood Glucose Distribution

Is it universal?

¹ Clinical Research Centre, Kuala Lumpur Hospital, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
² Department of Nephrology, Kuala Lumpur Hospital, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
³ Public Health Institute, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

OBJECTIVE—Bimodality in blood glucose (BG) distribution has been demonstrated in several populations with a high prevalence of diabetes and obesity. However, other population studies had not found bimodality, thus casting doubt on its universality. We address this question in four ethnic populations—namely Malay, Chinese, Indian, and the indigenous people of Borneo.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—A national health survey was conducted in Malaysia in 1996. A total of 18,397 subjects aged 30 years had post-challenge BG measurements taken. To test whether BG was consistent with a bimodal distribution, we fitted unimodal normal and skewed distribution as well a mixture of two normal distributions to the data by age and ethnic groups.

RESULTS—Age-specific prevalence of diabetes varied from 1.3 to 26.3%. In all ethnic/age groups, the bimodal model fitted the log BG data better (likelihood ratio tests, all P values <0.001).

CONCLUSIONS—Bimodality in BG distribution is demonstrable even in populations with a very low prevalence of diabetes and obesity. Previous studies that found unimodality had failed to detect the second mode because of inadequate sample size, bias due to treatment of subjects with known diabetes, and inclusion of subjects with type 1 diabetes in the sample. Bimodality implies that diabetes is a distinct entity rather than an arbitrarily defined extreme end of a continuously distributed measurement.

Abbreviations: BG, blood glucose

CiteULike    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				X. Li, H. Chu, J. E Gallant, D. R Hoover, W. J Mack, J. S Chmiel, and A. Munoz Bimodal virological response to antiretroviral therapy for HIV infection: an application using a mixture model with left censoring. J. Epidemiol. Community Health, September 1, 2006; 60(9): 811 - 818. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				J. Fan, S. J. May, Y. Zhou, and E. Barrett-Connor Bimodality of 2-h Plasma Glucose Distributions in Whites: The Rancho Bernardo Study Diabetes Care, June 1, 2005; 28(6): 1451 - 1456. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]