Submitted by Jealous-Pop-8997 t3_z4g1ab in science
eng050599 t1_iy1f7d2 wrote
Reply to comment by fasthpst in Glyphosate associated with lower birth weights by Jealous-Pop-8997
You just don't get it do you?
It's not the use of animal models that's the issue. It's the overall experimental design of the studies you elect to cite.
It's entirely possible to make use of the same animal model in multiple studies, it's how they are used in terms of the overall power of analysis that determines the strength of the study, and if it can be used to show causal effects, or is limited to correlative associations.
Quite simply, power of analysis reflects the ability of a given method to accurately differentiate between treatment effects and natural background noise at a specific threshold for significance.
The key elements that factor into this are the sample size, and the variability within the population.
The problem with the studies you cite is that they universally lack the strength to accomplish this for causal effects. There's simply too much noise in the background for them to accurately manage this.
This isn't the case for the OECD studies, as they were specifically developed to ensure that researchers would have the statistical power to test for causal effects, and they've been updated MANY times over the years to take into account new methods and overall knowledge relating to toxicology.
Just take a look at the review of Griem et al., (2015, Doi: 10.3109/10408444.2014.1003423).
It goes through a range of carcinogenicity and chronic toxicity studies and details not only studies that were fully compliant, as well as those who fall short of this.
Just in that review we see the successful replication of the OECD methods, with comparable results obtained from different lab, different researchers, different countries, and a period of two decades.
Now look at the studies that you've bet the farm on.
None of them even come close to the statistical power of one of the compliant studies, let alone be capable of rebutting the full collection of them.
[deleted] t1_iy222dp wrote
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