DebRD_ATL said:

The RDA is the wrong reference and it is worth understanding why.

This is exactly what I could not find anywhere else.

Adding the clinical framing, because it changes how the question reads. It is worth asking what the claim would look like if it were false. If nothing would look different, it is not a claim about the world and no amount of discussion will settle it.

jim_asheville said:

The honest answer is that the effect is real, the magnitude is contested, and the individual variation is larger than either.

Careful with the causal language. Two things moving together in a period when five things changed is not a mechanism, and stating it as one makes the thread less useful to somebody reading it later.

The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. One practical note: write down what you did and when, before you need it. Reconstructing a timeline from memory three months later is how people end up unable to answer the one question that would have resolved it.

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