Body Composition Phenotypes and Their Metabolic Associations in Treatment-Naïve Patients With Newly Diagnosed Type 2 Diabetes: A DXA-Based Cluster Analysis

Background and aims: We characterized body-composition heterogeneity in treatment-naive type 2 diabetes (T2DM) using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), and assessed whether cluster-metabolic associations persisted after accounting for sex-related body-composition differences.

Methods

K-means clustering of 50 DXA-derived body-composition variables classified 185 treatment-naive T2DM patients. Variance decomposition, sex-stratified analyses, sex-stratified clustering, sex-specific standardization clustering and multiple imputation (20 datasets) addressed sex confounding and missing data.