van Baal et al. BMC Public Health 2011, 11:163 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/11/163 Page 5 of 11 Men Women 0 20 60 80 0 20 60 80 s e t e b a i d e t a r t n e d i c n I s e t e b a i d n o i t r o p o r p e c n e l a v e r P 3 0 . 0 2 0 . 0 1 0 . 0 0 0 . 0 0 2 . 0 0 1 . 0 0 0 . 0 CMR RNH LINH Transitie RNUHLEO CMR RNH LINH Transitie RNUHLEO 40 Age Men 40 Age s e t e b a i d e t a r t n e d i c n I s e t e b a i d n o i t r o p o r p e c n e l a v e r P 3 0 . 0 2 0 . 0 1 0 . 0 0 0 . 0 0 2 . 0 0 1 . 0 0 0 . 0 CMR RNH LINH Transitie RNUHLEO CMR RNH LINH Transitie RNUHLEO 40 Age Women 40 Age 0 20 60 80 0 20 60 80 Figure 1 Incidence and prevalence for diabetes. Dots indicate the raw from the different GPRN’s, lines indicate predictions from the regression models. The black broken lines indicate prediction intervals using the fixed effects estimates only while the red lines broken lines include the between GPRN variance. occupy (i.e. the maximum value of each row). The bold faced numbers indicate which disease is most likely to take a certain rank position (i.e. the maximum value of each column). For instance, if we look at ranking according to the point estimates arthritis is ranked 4th. However, arthritis can take ranks between 1 and 12 with the first rank being most probably. The disease that is most likely to take the first position in terms of inci- dence is arthritis. Arthritis, coronary heart disease, cat- aracts, diabetes and hearing impairments all have a non- zero probability to rank first in terms of incidence, although the probability for hearing impairments is below the 5% level. Table 4 shows the stochastic ranking of disease preva- lence. Arthritis has the highest probability of being first in rank while diabetes is highest in rank if we look at point estimates. This is due to the fact that the point estimates of both diseases are very close to each other with their confidence intervals largely overlapping. The ranking of disease prevalence is similar to the ranking of