Fig. 2

Sex Ratios (M/F) for the prevalence of hypertension by age category in the Arab world. Legend: BP: Blood pressure; F: Female; M: Male. a Hypertension was assessed by actual BP measurements [26, 27, 39], or by either BP measurements or self-report of previous diagnosis [21, 24, 29, 31, 32, 34,35,36,37]; b Hypertension was self-reported. The solid line corresponds to the M/F ratio by age group for each study. The dotted horizontal line corresponds to a M/F ratio of 1; solid lines above represent higher prevalence among males and solid lines below represent higher prevalence among females. The sample size for each study is shown in parenthesis. The error bars presented in the graphs correspond to the 95% CI of the sex ratios. The 95% CI in three studies [25], [31], and [35], could not be calculated due to insufficient data. ^† The upper limits of the 95% CI of the sex ratios were: 3.39 for the age group of 21–34 in Matar et al., 2015 [29], 28.01 and 4.00 for the age groups of 20–29 and 30–39, respectively, in Baynouna et al., 2008 [39].These values are not shown on the graphs, as we fixed the upper limit of the y-axis to 3, in order to keep the same scale for all graphs and allow comparisons