Insulin Sensitivity and Insulin Secretion Determined by Homeostasis Model Assessment and Risk of Diabetes in a Multiethnic Cohort of Women: the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study
Response to Boyko et al.
- Yiqing Song, MD, SCD1 and
- Simin Liu, MD, SCD1234
- 1Division of Preventive Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts
- 2Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts
- 3Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health
- 4Department of Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, California
- Address correspondence to Simin Liu, Department of Epidemiology, University of California School of Public Health, Box 951772, 650 Charles E. Young Dr. South, Los Angeles, CA 90095. E-mail: siminliu{at}ucla.edu
We thank Boyko et al. (1) for their interest in our work (2). However, they seemed to have misunderstood our case definition. As a priori, our definition of diabetes was clinical diabetes with a special focus on those who were treated with hypoglycemic drugs or insulin. According to this standardized definition in our cohort, all the “prevalent” cases were indeed excluded from our original sampling space at baseline. Although these clinical diabetes cases may only represent one specific phenotype (treated and more severe cases) whose etiology may be different from that of other diabetes phenotypes (including those based on one measure of …
