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Figure 1 Follow diagram of systematic review and searches for hepatitis C virus infection prevalence among hemodialysis patients in the Middle-East countries.



Figure 2 Prevalence of hepatitis C virus infection among hemodialysis patients in the Middle-East region during the last decade according to the results of enzyme-linked Immunosorbent assay. The reported prevalence of each country separated by First author name and sorted by publication year. The overall prevalence and 95%CI is also reported for each country. Prevalence data are reported as ratio (95%CI). United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Israel, and Cyprus, were not added due to insufficient data.
Footnotes

Manuscript source: Unsolicited manuscript

Specialty type: Gastroenterology and hepatology

Country of origin: Iran

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Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Peer-review started: September 29, 2016

First decision: October 20, 2016

Article in press: December 19, 2016
P- Reviewer: Ahmed Said ZN, Alexopoulou A, Chemaitelly H, Farshadpour F, Larrubia JR, Nakajima H, Vilibic-Cavlek T S- Editor: Gong ZM L- Editor: A E- Editor: Wang CH


Table 1 The prevalence of Hepatitis C infection in Middle-East countries. Summary of studies by countries¹, age and hemodialysis duration are presented

Subgroup	Number of studies	Prevalence (95%CI)	Between studies		Between subgroups
			I^2	PHeterogeneity	Q	PHeterogeneity
Country
Iran	21	12% (10%-15%)	90.0%	0.001	30052.52	0.001
Iraq	9	20% (12%-28%)	97.3%	0.001
Egypt	7	50% (46%-55%)	94.7%	0.001
Jordan	4	35% (17%-54%)	97.4%	0.001
Yemen	4	42% (28%-56%)	93.4%	0.001
Turkey	4	23% (18%-28%)	66.3%	0.031
Palestine	3	18% (5%-30%)	94.8%	0.001
Lebanon	2	9% (1%-17%)	98.4%	0.001
Syria	1	54% (50%-59%)	-	-
Saudi	1	19% (13%-25%)	-	-
Age(yr)
< 40	4	24% (11%-38%)	95.4%	0.001	334.82	0.001
40-50	16	35% (26%-45%)	97.8%	0.001
≥ 50	26	20% (10%-29%)	99.7%	0.001
Hemodialysis duration (yr)
< 3	13	22% (15%-29%)	96.4%	0.001	3085.57	0.001
3-5	8	22% (4%-40%)	99.7%	0.001
≥ 5	9	30% (16%-45%)	99.0%	0.001

¹United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Israel, and Cyprus, were not added due to insufficient data. The prevalences are reported as ratio (95%CI).