A team led by the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Population Health Sciences, the University of Glasgow and members of the Scottish Diabetes Research Network have developed a new online tool to effectively diagnose which patients are most likely to develop diabetes.

The diabetes risk calculator will help doctors identify high risk patients so that they can receive appropriate treatment immediately. The cost-effective test analyses a person's risk of developing diabetes over the next three years based on their age, sex and the level of sugar in their blood.

The researchers said that blood sugar levels often increase during serious illness, but comes back to normal condition following recovery. This makes it difficult for doctors to identify patients who are at risk of diabetes, which is also determined by high levels of sugar in the blood.

"This tool will enable us to identify people at risk of diabetes and give them the opportunity to make positive lifestyle changes to improve their health, without the cost of running a national screening programme," Dr David McAllister, Clinical Lecturer in Epidemiology and Public Health, said in a statement.

The team compared records from more than 100,000 hospital patients to a national diabetes register to obtain necessary information to create the calculator.          

The finding is published today in the journal PLOS Medicine.

Increased consumption of convenient food products raises the risk of cardiometabolic syndrome, according to a new study by the Baylor University Medical Center.

The researchers said that the intake of food products like instant noodles two or three times a week increase the risk of developing heart disease, diabetes and stroke, especially in women.

"This research is significant since many people are consuming instant noodles without knowing possible health risks," Hyun Joon Shin, a clinical cardiology fellow and a nutrition epidemiology doctoral student at Harvard School of Public Health, said in a press release. "My hope is that this study can lay a foundation for future research about the health effects of instant noodle consumption."