An automated system for early diagnosis of type 2-diabetes mellitus is proposed in this paper, by using the Extreme Learning Machine neural network for classification and the evolutionary genetic algorithms for feature extraction, to be employed on a real data set from Saudi Arabian patients. The dimension of the feature space is reduced by the genetic algorithms and only the effective features are selected. The data is then fed to an Extreme Learning Machine neural network for classification. Diabetes is a major health problem in both industrial and developing countries, and when it appears in pregnancies it may cause many complications, hence its early diagnosis is beneficial for both mother and fetus. Our hybrid algorithm, the GA-ELM algorithm, has produced an optimized diagnosis of type 2-diabetes patients and classified the data set with an accuracy of 97.5% and with six effective features, out of the original eight features given in the dataset. Moreover, comparisons of the GA-ELM method with other available methods were conducted and the results are promising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]