Fig. 1

Disease trajectories from single disease to multimorbidity for men and women. The columns represent the diagnosis of first three non-communicable diseases in chronological order (from left to right). Each participant is represented by a stripe, the height of the columns and the thickness of the stripes are proportional to the number of people with a particular disease. For ease of visualisation, we grouped together diseases that affect the same organ system: neurodegenerative diseases (parkinsonism and dementia), heart diseases (coronary heart diseases and heart failure) and lung diseases (COPD and asthma); all the other diseases are represented separately. If an individual trajectory connects the same group (e.g. from heart diseases to heart diseases), then it connects different diseases within this group (i.e. coronary heart disease and heart failure, it does not imply a recurrent event). We did not consider a possible recovery from a disease, i.e. a participant cannot revert to a disease-free state or from having two diseases to having one disease. Online version of the figure shows the disease trajectories both separately for each sex and combined across sexes, and allows highlighting disease trajectories involving a particular disease selected by user https://www.ergo-onderzoek.nl/multimorbidity-velek-etal