Fig. 3

a: Kaplan Meier survival curves, with 95% confidence intervals, showing all-cause mortality for the normal (black) and elevated (red) BNC groups adjusted for age, sex, and smoking status. b: As A, but representing mortality recorded as ICD10 J44, with all other mortality as a competing risk. c: Ratios of the numbers of all, and severe, exacerbations over the year from the index date from both unadjusted models and models adjusted for age, sex and smoking status. All are relative to the normal BNC group. d: Rates of change of FEV₁, estimated by fitting mixed models to either all data or only that obtained in the three years from each individual’s index date. For clarity, the low and extreme BNC groups are not shown here, though equivalent plots showing all four BNC groups are shown in supplementary e-Figure 6