Continuous Glucose Monitoring Reveals Glycemic Patterns Associated with End-Organ Alterations in Early Dysglycemia
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Objective
To determine whether continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) identifies clinically relevant glycemic heterogeneity and subclinical end-organ alterations in adults without diabetes.
Research Design and Methods
We analyzed 1,017 AI-READI Year 3 participants without diabetes (558 with normoglycemia and 459 with prediabetes by A1C). Fifty-two metrics from 10-day blinded CGM were reduced to nonredundant glycemic axes. Partial Spearman correlations between representative CGM metrics and clinical measures across 13 domains were adjusted for age, sex, and BMI and controlled for false discovery rate. CGM-derived subphenotypes were identified using unsupervised UMAP-HDBSCAN-based clustering.
Results
Among 462 glycemic-clinical associations tested, 99 (21.4%) remained significant after false discovery rate correction. Hyperglycemia-related metrics, including mean glucose, time above range, and time in tight range, showed more associations than variability metrics. The strongest signals involved cardiometabolic, cardiovascular, and cognitive measures. Greater hyperglycemia and glucose excursions were associated with lower language performance, slower processing speed, and lower cognitive efficiency (ρ ≈ −0.10 to −0.14; all P < 0.01). Clustering identified four reproducible glycemic subphenotypes: Healthy, Mild Hyperglycemia, High Variability, and Hyperglycemia. CGM phenotypes reclassified A1C-defined groups: 58.1% of participants with normoglycemia fell into dysglycemic phenotypes, whereas 18.8% of participants with prediabetes fell into more favorable phenotypes. The Hyperglycemia phenotype had the most adverse cardiometabolic profile and lower cognitive performance.
Conclusions
In adults without diabetes, CGM revealed glycemic patterns associated with distinct subclinical alterations. CGM-based phenotyping may complement A1C for characterizing early dysglycemia and selecting individuals for longitudinal risk-stratification studies.
