those of EU and IDF criteria were 91.8% and 86.9% respectively. Similarly the NPV was highest for the NCEP criteria followed by the EU (99.3%) and IDF (98.3%) criteria. The kappa-statistics showed highest agreement with the NCEP criteria (kappa= 0.90) while the IDF (kappa= 0.46) and EU criteria (kappa= 0.33) displayed moderate and fair levels of agreement respectively with the WHO criteria. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings demonstrate that NCEP criteria displayed best performance parameters relative to WHO criteria and may serve as alternative to the WHO criteria when comparing other definitions used in older studies to current studies.