Certainly at first glance the suggestion seems plausible from the results. But the reported TT levels are troughs as I read so are the IM guys really spending more time at lower levels? I'd be curious if the treatment effect is confounded with age. Clearly significant difference in age between the treatment groups. In the context of this paper, is there a lurking effect that may be a nonlinear function of age?
[URL unfurl="true"]https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/95/10/4743/2835251[/URL]
If you did an intragroup analysis of age vs Hct, would there be an significant relationship?
If you remove treatment modality from the analysis in table 2b, does age then appear significant? I would want to understand if age and treatment modality are correlated and hence making treatment modality appear to be the significant effect when in reality there's some older guys dragging on the IM group?
Finally troughs are similar between groups so presumably Cavg is higher for the IM group?
If you repeated the study and switched the groups to receive the other treatment what would happen?
I realize it would be hard to keep Cavg the same across groups so then at least control for age so there's no significant difference in age between groups since erythrocytosis susceptibility with TRT seems to be a function of age.
