2.1 | Participants
This study recruited persons with
new diagnoses of T2DM and liver cirrhosis from the Longitudinal Cohort
of Diabetes Patients (LHDB) between January 1, 2000, and December 31,
2012, and they were followed until December 31, 2013. LHDB is part of
the National Health Insurance (NHI) Research Database (NHIRD). It
comprises data of 1,700,000 randomly selected newly diagnosed T2DM
patients with longitudinally linked data available from 1997 to 2013.
The NHIRD includes the health records of insured persons in Taiwan’s NHI
program, which was established in 1995 and covered approximately 99% of
Taiwan’s 23 million people by 2000 [11]. This administrative
database contains information of age, birth date, sex, living areas,
treatments, and disease diagnoses according to International
Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification
(ICD-9-CM) codes. To protect personal privacy, all information on the
care providers or patients was scrambled before being released. This
study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of China Medical
University and Hospital (CMUH104-REC2-115), and the need for informed
consent was waived.