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Figure 1 | BMC Family Practice

Figure 1

From: Trajectories of multimorbidity: exploring patterns of multimorbidity in patients with more than ten chronic health problems in life course

Figure 1

Distribution of number of chronic health problems within the ICPC chapters counted for each patient (Lifetime) in MM11 + −group (N = 4,560). For each patient in the MM11+ group the number of chronic health conditions during life are counted for each ICPC chapter separately. The term ‘cluster’ indicates the number of chronic health problems per subject WITHIN a particular ICPC chapter. For example, ‘cluster-3’ means that a patient has clustered three health conditions within one specific ICPC chapter in his or her trajectory, whereas ‘cluster-7+’ means that a patient has clustered 7 or more health conditions within one specific ICPC chapter. An individual patient may have clusters of different sizes, e.g. a certain patient may have a cluster of three respiratory conditions as well as a cluster of 7 or more gastrointestinal conditions. The capital letters K, L, P and R denote the ICPC chapters for cardiovascular, locomotor, psychiatric and respiratory conditions respectively, whereas the term “ICPC-chapters” refers to the calculated average for all 16 ICPC chapters; the y-axis shows the number of subjects in the MM11 + −group (N = 4,560) with the respective clusters of health conditions.

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