Why carry out this study?

Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is prevalent worldwide, and the epidemic of GDM is a great threat to maternal and neonatal health.

Accurate models for GDM prediction in pregnancies before the diagnosis of GDM between 24 and 28 weeks of gestation are lacking.

The aim of this study is to develop a risk scoring system to identify women at high risk of GDM in a Chinese population.

What was learned from the study?

The risk scoring system derived from clinical and biochemical predictors presented a good ability to discriminate pregnancies with increased risk of GDM. It performed well in both the internal and the external validation cohorts, with an area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.845 (95% CI = 0.805–0.884) and 0.886 (95% CI = 0.856–0.916), respectively.