From the other side of the consultation, briefly. Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then measure again under the same conditions.

PeptideSynthNJ said:

Give anything pharmacological four weeks before you judge it, and give anything measured weekly a four-point rolling average before you call it a…

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. If two explanations both fit, the useful question is which one predicts something the other does not. That is answerable; arguing about which sounds more plausible is not.

One concrete data point for the thread. For anyone reading later: the numbers in this thread are worth checking against a primary source before you act on them, including mine. Half the figures circulating in this community trace back to a secondary summary that dropped a qualifier.

If somebody has the primary source to hand I would rather cite it than paraphrase it.

Following on from PeptideSynthNJ — and this may be the naive question:

What did you change at the same time, and can you separate the two now?

Moderator note: good thread. Keeping it here rather than moving it, because the question is general enough to be useful. Carry on.