Comment on: Zhu et al. Fasting Plasma Glucose at 24–28 Weeks to Screen for Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: New Evidence From China. Diabetes Care 2013;36:2038–2040

The article by Zhu et al. (1) published in Diabetes Care concludes that a fasting plasma glucose (FPG) at 24–28 weeks’ gestation can be used in low-resource regions as a screening test to identify gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) in Chinese patients. However, in their experience, a screening protocol using FPG cutoff points of ≥4.4 and ≤5.0 mmol/L would fail to identify about 12% of the GDM cases and require a formal oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) to be performed in about half of the pregnant population (1). These observations contrast with our findings in a circum-Mediterranean population (2). In our …