This gets into the idea of a statistically significant difference, which means that numbers diverge, and a clinically significant difference, which means people should care
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Suffice it to say that if nuts improve your sex life by an amount barely big enough to be measured, most people aren't going to care
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There was another mammoth issue with the study - they used what's called a "per protocol" analysispic.twitter.com/Im9ZA40mOE
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Per protocol means that the researchers ignored dropouts from the intervention and analysed only those who completed the trial This is well-known to overestimate treatment effect and bias study results in randomized controlled trialspic.twitter.com/aFhDlO1u1i
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The problem is, if you ignore dropouts - particularly when they make up >30% of all your study participants as in this case - you lose a lot of data
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Furthermore, we KNOW that dropouts are less likely to achieve the outcome of interest (have better bangs) than people who finish the study
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So it's very likely that the only reason there were any results at all from this study, given how marginal the treatment effect was, is that they used this per protocol analysis methodology
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At the absolute minimum, trials like this usually present per-protocol analyses alongside less misleading results from an intention-to-treat analysispic.twitter.com/olSGRYJQ8b
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Why did the researchers choose such a problematic method to analyse their results? Impossible to know. But it might be to do with the funding bodypic.twitter.com/S28MCBBeq4
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Yes, the study on semen and sex quality was funded by - and I cannot believe I get to say this - Big Nut You cannot make this up, it's too good
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Also worth noting that the presentation in the media of this as a positive trial conflicts with the results, because for the majority of the things the researchers tested nuts made no difference
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I remain unconvinced that eating 60g of nuts a day will do anything whatsoever for your sex life, based on this researchpic.twitter.com/WvBWzZJVAi
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