production of advanced glycation end products [AGEs], a proinflammatory microenvironment, and the induction of oxidative stress 8,9. These mechanisms can lead to diabetic nephropathy, neuropathy, and retinopathy 10. Macrovascular complications, which affect the large vessels of the body, are usually caused by atherosclerosis and may lead to stroke, acute myocardial infarction, or vessel blockage in the legs (i.e., peripheral vascular disease). A recent review suggested that although microvascular complications distinctly precede macrovascular complications, both progress simultaneously on a continuum 11. Most type 2 diabetes-related complications progress over a period of years. Therefore, it would be useful to know the expected clinical trajectories as these data would not only guide the decisions regarding and delivery of early preventive care, but may also help physicians to explain the course of type 2 diabetes and warn their patients about complications. Moreover, the prevalence of type 2 diabetes-related complications is known to differ with respect to age, sex, ethnicity and duration of diabetes 12-19. Therefore, an analysis of the factors affecting the trajectories of complications could provide new insights into patient management, prevention, or treatment. However, most published studies on the complications of type 2 diabetes were limited to one or a few complications and applied large-scale approaches without time considerations. For example, Jeong et al. developed a diagnostic progression network based on claims data with the aim of determining the global patterns of diagnosis in South Korea 20. However, this network provided only information about the associations between diagnosis pairs, rather than the sequential trajectories. Furthermore, Jensen et al. used electronic patient records from a Danish population to suggest temporal trajectory clusters of various diseases, including diabetes, and thus predict disease evolution over time 21. However, these trajectories were only evaluated using full population data, rather than data stratified by different combinations of sex and age. In this study, we aimed to construct time-dependent type 2 diabetes trajectories based on population-wide claim data. These trajectories would be expected to reveal time-critical associations between type 2 diabetes and other diseases and identify differences in the patterns of progression among various age and sex groups. To overcome the insufficient definition of a diagnosis simply as a direct complication of type 2 diabetes according to sequential patterns from claims data, we used the term "accompanying comorbidity" rather than "complication" to encompass all possible relationships with type 2 diabetes. Results Clinical and demographic characteristics of participants in the case-control study. A total of 49,893,982 incidence records and 396,777,916 prescription records for 1,113,655 patients were recorded between January 2002 and December 2013. Among them, 225,406 patients met our defined criteria for a type 2 diabete...