Journal of general internal medicine
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The relationship between risk factor or biomarker trajectories and contemporaneous short-term clinical outcomes is poorly understood. In diabetes patients, it is unknown whether hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) trajectories are associated with clinical outcomes and can inform care in scenarios in which a single HbA1c is uninformative, for example, after a diagnosis of coronary artery disease (CAD). ⋯ In clinical settings where single HbA1c measurements provide limited information, HbA1c trajectories may help stratify risk of complications in diabetes patients. Joint latent class modeling provides a generalizable approach to examining relationships between biomarker trajectories and clinical outcomes in the era of near-universal adoption of electronic health records.