Multi-level analysis reveals the association between diabetes, body mass index, and HbA1c in an Iraqi population

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) known as a complex metabolic disorder may cause health problems and changes in blood biochemical markers. A growing number of studies have looked into several biomarkers and their connections with T2D risk. However, few have explored the interconnection of these biomarkers, as well as the prospective alterations in the diabetes biomarker correlation network. We conducted a secondary analysis in order to introduce a multi-level approach to establish a relationship between diabetes, pre-diabetes, blood biochemical markers, age, and body mass index (BMI). The dataset was obtained from the Mendeley Data (available at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/wj9rwkp9c2/1. In this study, three groups were established: non-diabetic (n = 103), pre-diabetic (n = 53), and diabetic (n = 844). According to the Heatmap analysis, non-diabetic and pre-diabetic individuals had the lowest BMI, age, and HbA1c. Diabetes and pre-diabetes were correlated with BMI (r = 0.58 and − 0.27, respectively), age (r = 0.47 and − 0.28, respectively), and HbA1c (r = 0.55 and − 0.21, respectively) using Pearson analysis. Using multivariate analysis, we found that diabetes, BMI, age, HbA1c, cholesterol, triglyceride, LDL, VLDL, and HDL were all associated. Network analysis revealed a connection between BMI and diabetes at the highest cut-off point. Moreover, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis validated the network findings, revealing that BMI (area under the ROC curve, AUC = 0.95), HbA1c (AUC = 0.94), and age (AUC = 0.84) were the best predictors of diabetes. In conclusion, our multi-step study revealed that identifying significant T2D predictors, such as BMI and HbA1c, required a series of mathematical analyses.