CONTEXT Sufficient numbers of patients are necessary to generate statistically reliable measurements of physicians' quality and cost performance. OBJECTIVE To determine whether primary care physicians in the same physician practice collectively see enough Medicare patients annually to detect meaningful differences between practices in ambulatory quality and cost measures. DESIGN, SETTING, A...

CONTEXT Care of patients with type 2 diabetes has been revolutionized throughout the past several years-first, by the realization of the importance of tight glycemic control in forestalling complications, and second, by the availability of several unique classes of oral antidiabetic agents. Deciphering which agent to use in certain clinical situations is a new dilemma facing the primary care ph...

BACKGROUND 1,5-Anhydroglucitol (1,5-AG), fructosamine, and glycated albumin are of increasing interest as alternative measures of hyperglycemia. We characterize the associations of these nontraditional glycemic markers with hemoglobin A(1c) (Hb A(1c)) and fasting glucose and assess their ability to identify people with diabetes. METHODS We conducted a cross-sectional comparison of 1,5-AG, fru...

BACKGROUND Although basic research has implicated abnormal glucose metabolism in the pathogenesis of hypertension (HTN), epidemiologic studies are limited. METHODS We assessed whether baseline hemoglobin A(1c) (HbA(1c)) was prospectively associated with HTN in the Women's Health Study (WHS). We analyzed 19,858 women initially free of HTN, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease (CVD) with baseli...

BACKGROUND Glycohemoglobin (GHB), reported as hemoglobin (Hb) A(1c), is a marker of long-term glycemic control in patients with diabetes and is directly related to risk for diabetic complications. HbE and HbD are the second and fourth most common Hb variants worldwide. We investigated the accuracy of HbA(1c) measurement in the presence of HbE and/or HbD traits. METHODS We evaluated 23 HbA(1c)...

OBJECTIVE Hemoglobin A(1c) (HbA(1c)) is recommended for identifying diabetes and prediabetes. Because HbA(1c) does not fluctuate with recent eating or acute illness, it can be measured in a variety of clinical settings. Although outpatient studies identified HbA(1c)-screening cutoff values for diabetes and prediabetes, HbA(1c)-screening thresholds have not been determined for acute-care setting...

BACKGROUND Type 2 diabetes mellitus is a progressive metabolic disease necessitating therapies with sustained efficacy and safety over time. Exenatide once weekly (ExQW), an extended-release formulation of the glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist exenatide, has demonstrated improvements in glycemic and cardiometabolic measures from 30 weeks to 2 years of treatment. Here, the efficacy and sa...

INTRODUCTION The discordance between glycated hemoglobin (HbA(1C)) and fructosamine (FA) estimations in the assessment of glycemia is often encountered. A number of mechanisms might explain such discordance, but whether or not they are consistent is uncertain. Nevertheless, the fact that there is a discrepancy in HbA(1C) and mean blood glucose cannot be ignored in the monitoring of glycemic con...