![]() If a trial only recruited men, for instance, women reading the study should keep in mind that its results may be less applicable to them. Your mileage may vary, as the creatine example shows, yet a study’s demographic information can help you assess this study’s applicability. ![]() For example, while creatine is widely recognized as safe and effective, there are “nonresponders” for whom this supplement fails to improve exercise performance. In health and fitness, applicability means that a compound or intervention (i.e., exercise, diet, supplement) that is useful for one person may be a waste of money - or worse, a danger - for another. Note that a study often starts with more participants than it ends with diet studies, notably, commonly see a fair number of dropouts.Īpplicability. The larger the sample size of a study (i.e., the more participants it has), the more reliable its results. The demographic information can be lengthy, you might be tempted to skip it, yet it affects both the reliability of the study and its applicability. If you know that a field is contentious yet a paper only mentions studies that support the authors’ conclusions, you may want to make your own search for other papers on the topic (always a good idea at any rate).įigure 3: Example study protocol to compare two diets On that note, keep in mind that companies are not alone in cherry-picking studies. It is therefore important, if you seek the truth (and not just some ammunition for a Twitter brawl) to look at the whole body of evidence, and to consider fairly the studies that don’t agree with your original opinion (if you have one, but most of us do). If you seek one study that shows the contrary, you’ll find one too. If you seek one study that shows that a low-fat diet is better than a low-carb diet to promote weight loss, you’ll find one. Likewise, it is usually easy for warring camps to throw studies at each other to “prove” their point. If a company wants to sell you creatine as a testosterone booster, they’ll mention the one study that found an increase in testosterone, not the nine that found no increase. Unsurprisingly, it is common for supplement companies to cherry-pick studies. Meta-analyses, however, are a lot more complicated than that: they must take into account various criteria, such as the design of the study, the number of participants, and the biases that affect the results, rather than reduce each study to a positive or negative result.) (This is a simplified example, in which we used “vote counting”: we compared the number of studies that found an effect to the number of studies that found no effect. ![]() For instance, if you read only one study that looked at the effect of creatine on testosterone and it found an increase, then 100% of your data says that creatine increases testosterone but if you read ten studies that looked at the effect of creatine on testosterone and only one found an increase, then 90% of your data says that creatine does not increase testosterone. Reading several studies on a given topic will provide you with more information - more data - even if you don’t know how to run a meta-analysis. One study is just one piece of the puzzle Introductions are often a great place to find additional reading material since the authors will frequently reference previous, relevant, published studies. So researchers set out to conduct larger, more rigorous trials to determine if stevia could be an effective treatment for diabetes. Here, the authors usually summarize previous related research and explain why they decided to investigate further.įor example, the non-caloric sweetener stevia showed promise as a way to help improve blood sugar control, particularly in diabetics. ![]() It should clearly identify the research question the authors hope to answer with their study. Before citing a study as evidence in a discussion, make sure to read the whole paper, because it might turn out to be weak evidence. Because it does not provide context, an abstract does not often make clear the limitations of an experiment or how applicable the results are to the real world. Since there’s a lot of information to pack into a few paragraphs, an abstract can be unintentionally misleading. The abstract is a brief summary that covers the main points of a study. Those sections vary between papers, but they usually include an abstract, an introduction, a section on methods (which provides demographic information, presents the design of the study, and sometimes expounds on the chosen endpoints), and a conclusion (which is often split between “results” and “discussion”).
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