The confidence intervals for the pooled RR do not contain 1.0, allowing us to conclude that chance is an unlikely explanation for study findings.
In contrast, the recreational physical activity studies had low statistical power, even in aggregate, and the findings were suggestive but did not allow chance to be ruled out as an explanation for study findings.
Of the 169 papers that did not meet inclusion criteria, short duration of follow-up (n=46) and lack of parameterisation of physical activity (n=77) are the most common explanation for study exclusion.
However, it has been pointed out that there are ecological and biological constraints on this test; not all species are visually oriented, and some find eyes aversive (this was the explanation for studies that failed to show MSR in gorillas).
Charity fund-raisers offered several possible explanations for the study's findings.
There are several potential explanations for this study's age-specific differences in BMD outcome.
33 34 There are several possible explanations for our study findings that measures of central obesity are better predictors of CVD risk than BMI.
Each study was evaluated with respect to explicitly identified characteristics of epidemiologic design and analysis to examine whether chance, bias, or confounding could be alternative explanations for the study's results.
Other possible explanations for between-study variability could be that most of the reported association studies are based on small sample sizes and might not give enough power to detect true associations.
These 5 associations were perused in detail to highlight potential explanations for between-study heterogeneity.
The differences in design are considered below as possible explanations for the studies' contrary findings.
