To determine the ideal cutoff for the 1-hour 50-gram glucose challenge test performed prior to 16 weeks of gestation Single center retrospective cohort study of adult singleton pregnant women who had glucose challenge (GCT) and tolerance testing (GTT) prior to 16 weeks (early) or between 24 and 28 weeks of gestation (routine), sent to the laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine between December 2007 and June 2017. We calculated the sensitivity, specificity and Youden Index of cutoffs between 130 mg/dL and 199 mg/dL for the early GCT and routine GCT. 20,619 women met study criteria, overall prevalence of GDM was 14.9% (7.4% early diagnosis, 17.2% routine diagnosis). Youden index estimates optimal cutoff value of 132 mg/dL for early GCT with corresponding sensitivity and specificity of 100% and 80% whereas optimal cutoff for routine GCT was 130mg/dL with corresponding sensitivity and specificity of 100% and 82%. Area under the curve for early GCT is 0.95 ± 0.0022 and for routine GCT is 0.95 ± 0.0074 (p=0.81). Both the early and routine GCT are good screening tests with optimal cutoff values of 132 mg/dL and 130mg/dL, respectively. Lower cutoffs are crucial in order to capture all cases of GDM within the population. As the ROC for the early and late GCT are similar, using a similar threshold for the early GCT is clinically justified. Further studies are needed to correlate cutoff values with clinical outcomes.
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