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A comment on Drinking 1% rather than 2% milk accounts for 4.5 years of less aging in adults. Parent comment

Re:Drinking 1% rather than 2% milk accounts for 4.5 years of... by dtwest on Wednesday January 15, 2020 @01:00PM (#22056553)
How would one handle that many factors? I am very curious what the techniques for doing so would be.

I'm no expert but my initial reaction would be that you need more than 5834 adults in a study that controls for all of those factors. We don't really know how household size, for example, would affect the results, so wouldn't you need a bunch of test data to analyze all of the combinations? Or did they only study people who are the same in most of them? (i.e. 45, male, with a household size of 4, nonsmoking, etc...)

Would love to hear from someone more informed on this than myself.

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Re:Drinking 1% rather than 2% milk accounts for 4.5 years of... by iron0013 on Wednesday January 15, 2020 @01:42PM (#22057047)
It depends on the effect sizes, but in most contexts 5k participants is considered a very sufficient sample. You don’t need millions of participants to study things like this.
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