Some caution is needed in extrapolating outcomes to patients with milder disease, but the findings are likely to be applicable to secondary care patients in general.
Our results are generalisable to patients managed surgically by fasciectomy or dermofasciectomy, however caution is needed in extrapolating these findings to other surgical or less invasive procedures where the role of post-operative hand therapy including splinting remains largely unknown.
Third, because our subjects were mostly Japanese, caution is needed in extrapolating our results to other ethnic groups.
Because medical treatments after AMI are outdated (low use of dual antiplatelet therapy and statin therapy), caution is needed in extrapolating our results to the current clinical settings.
For all of these reasons, care is needed in extrapolating our findings to the late life effects of current training schemes.
However, some caution is needed in extrapolating our data to predict the in vivo efficacy of SP. Additional prospective in vivo studies, especially in the nonimmune host, are required to definitively link antifolate molecular markers with in vivo resistance (18 – 20 ).
Although there is no evidence of bias, the responders represent a quarter of the population in two PCTs; hence, caution is needed in extrapolating the results to the general population.
The spatial heterogeneity of observed trends (in the lowlands of southeast England especially) suggests caution is needed in extrapolating from small catchments to large regions; understanding this heterogeneity is a major topic for future research.
Though our study is the largest ever conducted in Europe, with the greatest number of countries and areas, and our estimates did not indicate strong heterogeneity in associations across cohorts, some caution is needed in extrapolating our results, particularly in relation to the heterogeneity between areas, and more importantly to the small sample size in each area.
A limitation of this study was the employment of the sample mean value in the calculation of the MetSynd risk score; thus, caution is needed in extrapolating results.
