Benefits of a factorial design focusing on inclusion of female and male animals in one experiment.

Benefits of a factorial design focusing on inclusion of female and male animals in one experiment. J Mol Med (Berl). 2019 Apr 13;: Authors: Buch T, Moos K, Ferreira FM, Fröhlich H, Gebhard C, Tresch A Abstract Disease occurrence, clinical manifestations, and outcomes differ between men and women. Yet, women and men are most of the time treated similarly, which is often based on experimental data over-representing one sex. Accounting for persisting sex bias in biomedical research is the misconception that the analysis of sex-specific effects would double sample size and costs. We designed an analysis to test the potential benefits of a factorial study design in the context of a study including male and female animals. We chose a 2 × 2 factorial design approach to study the effect of treatment, sex, and an interaction term of treatment and sex in a hypothetical situation. We calculated the sample sizes required to detect an effect of a given magnitude with sufficient power and under different experimental setups. We demonstrated that the inclusion of both sexes in experimental setups, without testing for sex effects, requires no or few additional animals in our scenarios. These experimental designs still allow for the exploration of sex effects at low cost. In a confirmatory instead of an exploratory design, we observed an increase in total sample sizes by 33%, at most. Since the complexities associated with this mathematical mod...
Source: Molecular Medicine - Category: Molecular Biology Authors: Tags: J Mol Med (Berl) Source Type: research