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Cognitive impairments that everybody has
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Description: Simulation code and figure for a comment on the following article: Swanson R.L., II, Hampton S., Green-McKenzie J., Diaz-Arrastia R., Grady M.S.,Verma R. et al. (2018). Neurological manifestations among US government personnel reporting directional audible and sensory phenomena in Havana, Cuba. JAMA, 319 (11), 1125-1133. doi:10.1001/jama.2018.1742 The R code posted here runs a simulation to assess the likelihood of the neuropsychological test outcomes reported in eTable 2 of Swanson et al (2018). The method is to to replicate eTable 2 with random numbers from a uniform distribution between 1 and 100, and to count how many people showed at least one impairment per domain (at or below 40th percentile). This is done 1000 times. Boxplots are generated to illustrate the outcomes of the simulation, for comparison with the outcomes reported by Swanson and colleagues. The only deviations are where the observed number of impairments was fewer than expected by chance (possibly because the people tested were smarter than average). The boxplots illustrate these results.