Figure 4 (a) illustrates the PC cost trend having an increasingly pronounced positive linear trend as we progressed from mild, moderately severe to severe ischemic stroke subgroups although the linear trend of PC associated cost was statistically significant only for moderately severe ischemic group with borderline significance ( p < 0.15) for severe ischemic group (Table 3 ).
A decreasing trend of acute hospitalization associated cost was observed with adjusted exponentiated cost estimates from Q2 to Q4 being 0.52 (95% CI: 0.32, 0.83), 0.40 (95% CI: 0.23, 0.68) and 0.33 (95% CI: 0.20, 0.54) when compared with Q1 suggesting expected acute hospitalization associated cost decreased by 48, 60 and 67% for Q2, Q3 and Q4 respectively when contrasted with Q1.
We also observed that while the PC visit trajectory for the whole stroke cohort showed a decreasing trend over time, the PC visit associated cost trajectory showed an increasing trend over time.