Fig. 1

Illustration of the exclusion criteria applied to generate an analytic dataset from a merger of national health and nutrition examination survey cycle years 2009 to 2016. The described exclusion criteria were applied for the following reasons: HIV infection depletes the innate immune system and may affect monocyte count; pregnancy was considered to affect female complete blood cell counts and the dataset was restricted to subjects ≥ 18 years of age as complete blood cell counts differ by developmental stage. Cycle refers to the two-year NHANES data cycle (SDDSRVYR) from which the data was retrieved. Following application of the exclusion criteria, n = 18,895 observations were omitted as they lacked complete case information across 15 variables. The complete case analytic dataset contains n = 5281 unweighted observations from the survey sample, one-hundred and twenty-two (n = 122) of which were exposed to chronic HCV