Fig. 3

Proportion with each comorbidity count in trials and community: stratified by index condition. This plot indicates the proportion of comorbidity counts for each index condition. The height of the plot indicates the percentage of participants/patients with a particular count for each index condition. For community-based patients, the proportion of patients with each comorbidity count has been standardised to the trial populations; this was done by applying age-sex-specific proportions to the age-sex distributions of the trial participants. For the trial participants, where there were multiple trials per condition, the proportion with each comorbidity was obtained from the modelled mean comorbidity counts for each index condition (see Table 2), under the assumption that the proportion of trial participants with each comorbidity count follows a Poisson distribution. Where there was only a single trial for a given condition (e.g. osteoarthritis), raw proportions are given. See Additional file 5 for further details of these analyses