Comment by amluto

Huh, interesting. Although I feel obligated to object:

> After the treatment period, and 6 months after treatment stopped, there were no significant differences between the groups in terms of changes in degree of myopia compared with baseline. Nor were there significant differences in axial length within the two groups when compared with baseline measurements.

This implies essentially nothing about the efficacy of atropine — it actually means “if there was an effect, then the study was underpowered for the size of the effect or otherwise failed to detect it.” One could quantify the degree to which the study actually suggests that the treatment didn’t work, but the authors did not do that.

I, too, can fail to detect a benefit to low-dose atropine. Hey, look, I just enrolled 0 subjects and didn’t confirm the effect. So it wasn’t “significant!” But I obviously showed nothing at all.

Looking at the actual summary in the linked paper’s results section, and doing no real math, it does look like it genuinely contradicts the idea that low-dose atropine is as effective as previous studies seem to suggest, which is interesting. But that’s not what the authors, or the NIH summary, wrote!