Minor points "There are no error bars to indicate biological or technical variability in Figure 3 or 4. " Error bars have been added to illustrate technical variability in Figure 3 and Figure 4, respectively.
Minor points There are no error bars to indicate biological or technical variability in Figure 3 or 4. The workflow of Figure 1 does not indicate that the right-hand-side pathway involved only PBMC, not whole blood.
The variability in Figure 1 is a reflection of chance effects in small populations [ 25], and given the small size of many of these patient groups the picture is one of consistency.
On PND14 only, a single CAPs-treated female showed enlarged lateral ventricles as indicated by increased variability in Figure 2E for CAPs-females at that time point; however, this effect failed to reach statistical significance.
This may be too small, so some of this intraindividual variability may have been transferred into the population variability, hence inflating the variability shown in Figure 6.
Does this account for the variability in different figures?
Several factors give rise to the variability in the figures reported in these studies, including the heterogeneity of methods used to assess VFDs (Manji and Plant, 2000), and differences in the nature and extent of surgery (Egan et al., 2000).
A number of FM prevalence studies have been conducted and have demonstrated great variability in prevalence figures between 0.5% and 57% [ 6], [ 15- 20] according to the countries, criteria and data collection methods used.
Reducing list consistency would require increasing service rate (supply side policy) and the variability shown in Figure 4 depends on variability of arrival rate and of service rate (i.e. admitted patients).
For noise, the relationships were similar to those with variability, and they appear even stronger than those with variability in general (Figure 4E H).
