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Comment by adewinter | Hacker News Reader

There doesn't seem to be any information regarding adherence to the protocol. Did the participants manage to keep to either strictly Intermittent Fasting or a stern 3-meals-per-day-and-nothing-else program? Considering that the participants were all "Overweight" or "Obese", implying that the participants have historical issues with portion/calorie-intake control, that seems like a pretty important point to ignore.

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Certainly hard to measure, but Figure 2A certainly looks like an adherence chart.

Regardless, in RCTs we usually consider a 'intention to treat' analysis gold-standard. That means that since you are assigning an intervention in the real world, even if someone drops out, you still consider them part of the intervention group, because the same thing will happen in the real world. You can also do a 'per protocol' analysis, which attempts to measure the impact of the intervention to those that adhered, but not as important...

That's a fair point: if study subjects can't/won't adhere to the protocol why would we expect real world participants to do so? Either the study subjects adhered to the program and the results showed (little to) no improvement OR real people won't adhere to the program anyway and results will show (little to) no improvement.

As an individual though I would certainly want to know about a treatment that would cure my condition, even if few people tend to stick with it.

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