The Diabetes Empowerment Scale-Short Form (DES-SF)

ur objective was to evaluate the diagnostic proficiency of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP)-III definitions (1,2) for the metabolic syndrome in a Mexican nationwide, population-based survey. Details of the sampling procedures have been previously described (3). The population was composed of 2,158 men and women aged 20 -69 years sampled after a 9-to 12-h fasting period. For the WHO criteria, insulin resistance was diagnosed if a nondiabetic case had fasting insulin concentrations 126 pmol/l (21 U/ml) (75th percentile in Mexican adults). The ageadjusted prevalence was 13.61% for the WHO criteria (n 268) and 26.6% for the NCEP-III definition (n 574). After excluding patients with diabetes, the prevalence was 9.2 and 21.4%, respectively. The agreement between the definitions was assessed in 1,969 subjects; 189 cases were eliminated due to the lack of a urine sample.