Diabetes mellitus is a worldwide proliferated noninfectious disease in these years. Although it is not dangerous for life, but the complications such as kidney disease, blindness, foot disease or nerve damage will result in severe degradation of the vital quality of the diabetics. So, the monitoring of those diabetes related indexes is very important for controlling and treatment of the disease. More accurate and convenient methods for their assay are in expect The electrochemiluminescent (ECL) and chemiluminescent (CL) analysis have received high attention because of their excellent sensitivity, low back-ground signal and other advantages. Especially combined with some biological measures, they have shown excellent specificity, and flexibility for a wide range of analytes, leading to their usefulness in clinical tests including diabetes. This paper will review the progress of this luminescent assay for diabetes mellitus in present years. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.