However, in comparing standard demographic and clinical characteristics, including age, gender, race, employment status, duration of pDPN, pain severity, sleep outcomes, and anxiety and depression, the current study sample appears consistent with samples in previously published studies, which used alternative sampling methods.
The power prior distribution is a tool to estimate the effect of an intervention in a current study sample, while accounting for the information provided by previous research.
Future studies are being planned with increased sample size and comparisons with gender- and age-matched control sample in order to overcome the current study sample size limitation.
However, in the current study, samples were fixed as whole-mount tissue, without any structural perturbation taking place.
Previous research using a larger sample pool, from which the current study sample was selected, investigated the FCE regarding doping and social drug use and provided compelling evidence of the differences in projected use of doping among peers and attitude between those athletes who confessed to having personal experience with doping and those who claimed no use [32].
Although the current study sample was large compared to previous studies in this area, it could have been too small to detect significant results, especially regarding the comparison of subgroups, including the post hoc analysis of the potential effect of lifetime alcohol use disorder.
Cardiovascular risk factors and phenotypic details are summarized in Table 2. Recent GWA analyses [11], [12] using a part of the current study sample (n = 1,021) revealed no population stratification effects within unrelated individuals form the German MI Family Study using the genomic control method [13].
