Another related limitation is that patients assigned to no-treatment may have been disappointed, thus inflating the differences between open-label placebo and no-treatment control groups.
Further adjustment for mediating factors early in the lifecourse inflates the difference between the ART and comparison group children (Model 4), whereas adjusting for the later mediating influence of parental involvement reduces the difference (Model 5).
However substantial bias was introduced when error was associated with a particular hospital, as errors in data from one hospital led to an apparent lower rate and therefore falsely inflated the difference between units.
Overdiagnosis of small breast cancers artificially inflates the difference, and length bias means that screening preferentially detects small, slow-growing cancers, simply because there is more time to detect them.
Importantly, there were no significant sex differences in the crude annual percentage change or in the annual percentage change adjusted for age, BMI, and offspring/control status in cartilage volume in any plates; sex differences were evident only after further adjustment for baseline cartilage volume and bone size, and this could have inflated the difference.
There was a prolonged delay before drug companies finally submitted the required information, thereby artificially inflating the average difference between Canada and the EU.
Because a HR cannot be calculated for the latter, they were excluded, but of course 0 versus 0 is equal hazard (and not zero information) thus inflating the final difference.
By imputing key unreported data instead of contacting the trial investigators, Jacob and colleagues introduced major errors favoring tetrastarch; for example, inflating the blood loss difference in one trial by 2.3-fold.
Altogether, we conclude that differential use of context slightly inflates the capacity difference between the retro-cue and post-cue conditions, but the majority of the difference cannot be explained by this factor.
