OBJECTIVES: To review the variety of diabetes risk assessment tools and their validity METHODS: An electronic literature search of the EMBASE, MEDLINE, Cochrane library was undertaken using key words ‘diabetes risk’ and screening or assessment or score or questionnaire, ‘diabetes prediction’, ‘medical screening’, and ‘health risk assessment’  from 1995-2010. References of identified articles were also manually searched. RESULTS: The electronic search retrieved a total of 2168 articles reporting diabetes risk questionnaires. Deletion of duplicates by Endnote and manual culling produced a list of 41 questionnaires developed in 22 countries, with the majority (n=26) developed in North America and Europe; the remainder were from Asia (n=10), Middle-East (n=3), Africa (n=1) and Australia(n=1). Of the 41 questionnaires, 17 were developed for screening of undiagnosed diabetes and 24 for predicting the risk of developing disease in the next 2-20 years. All identified tools are short questionnaires of 2-16 questions with common variables of diabetes risk factor such as age, gender, waist circumference, BMI, family history of diabetes, history of hypertension or antihypertensive medications being used for risk assessment. While scoring format and cutoff points are diverse across the questionnaires, the overall sensitivity, specificity, area under receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) ranged from 40-97% and 24-86% and 62-87% respectively. Comparatively speaking, there were more tools developed for predicting the risk of developing disease in recent years. CONCLUSIONS: There is a trend of increasing availability of diabetes prediction tools with the existing diabetes risk assessment tools being generally short questionnaire aiming for ease of use in clinical practice. The overall performance of existing tools showed moderate to high accuracy in their predictive performance. However, there are not enough reports about their application in real-life clinical settings to allow an assessment of their effectiveness in routine practice.