Update publication information. Diabetes retinopathy (DR) and diabetes kidney disease (DKD) are the complications of diabetes and causing serious health and economic burden to society. However, identification and characterization of early biomarkers for DKD, especially for non-proliferative DR (NPDR) patients with DKD, are still lacking. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the proteomic profile of plasma in NPDR+DKD and NPDR patients and to identify the potential biomarkers for the early diagnosis of DKD. Fifteen plasma samples of NPDR group and nine of NPDR+DKD group were analyzed by LC-MS/MS to identify the regulated proteins between two groups. Function enrichment analysis, protein-protein interaction analysis and clinical features correlation analysis reveals the target protein candidates, which were verified using ELISA and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. A total of 410 proteins in the plasma were detected, of which, 15 were significantly upregulated and 7 were downregulated in NPDR+DKD group. The bioinformatics analysis suggested that DKD is closely related to cell adhesion and immunity pathways. -2-microglobulin (B2M) and vimentin (VIM) were upregulated in NPDR+DKD, enriched as hub proteins and had strong correlation with clinical features. ELISA results shown that both B2M (p<0.001) and VIM (p<0.0001) were significantly upregulated in NPDR+DKD compared with NPDR. ROC analysis demonstrated that B2M and VIM owned the ability to distinguish DKD from NPDR with the area under the curve of 0.900 0 (p < 0.0001) and of 0.9950. In summary, our proteomic study revealed alterations in the proteomic profile and identified VIM and B2M as early biomarkers of DKD, therefore, lay the foundation for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of DKD.