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Comment by vwoolf | Hacker News Reader

Money shot: "45 participants were recruited (30 to IVM and 15 controls)." These tiny trials say nothing apart from "more research needed."

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In this case, I think you're right, it's a small sample. More generally, the statistical power of a test [1] relates the sample size with the magnitude of the effect to test.

In other words, subtle effects need a huge population to distinguish from noise, while huge effects will show even with small populations. All this is very sensitive to bias due to selected population as always.

All in all, I agree, more research needed. Anyone knows more research about this, with bigger samples?

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_a_test

It's widely available as a generic drug, so no pharma company is going to conduct a large sample clinical study, which costs 10s or 100s of millions. It would have to be a publicly funded clinical trial, of which I haven't really heard of.

Indeed, more research needed.

But we do have to start somewhere.

You're not wrong. We NEED large scale trials for this ASAP.

I don't understand your knee-jerk negativity here though.

There are plenty of non-double-blind studies that show significant potency of these treatments. Not only this, it is a cheap and proven safe treatment that we have used for decades. This is a very low risk treatment with a huge potential upside.

Why would you be anything but positive about this news? Whose payroll you on buddy?

>Why would you be anything but positive about this news? Whose payroll you on buddy?

OP points out that more research is needed, which it is. And you accuse them of being a schill? Wow.

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