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Underpowered

Posted by hdahlborg on 12 May 2021 at 02:02 GMT

When trying to find infromation about neutering at 6 months, every pop source I find represents as fact that Golden Retrievers will develop joint problems and other health problems. I dig for the source and found this. With such sample sizes this seems like a classic situation of under powered, overstated results becoming gospel. Thankfully my vet tipped me off, saying he'd returned from a conference where the limits of this had been discussed and I should not give it as much credence as the rest of the internet does. For anyone who wants to understand the limits of this study, just think if you would try to make assumptions about the long term outcome for 5 major disease categories using sample group sizes of 70-178 people with out knowing anything but if they'd had a tubal or vasectomy, with no accounting of other lifestyle or circumstance factors. With such a small sample, you could not make good generalization and if there were a cluster of cases it would suggest a huge effect that might not be real.
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No competing interests declared.