For one thing, while our sample size—four mice per group—aligns with the standard for this kind of exploratory research, it might still yield inconsistent findings due to individual differences in intestinal microbiota, as evidenced by the marginal significance ( p = 0.051).
When looking at changes over time, there was a near-significant ( p = 0.051) drop in the Shannon index for the CON group between days one and seven, while the treatment groups maintained stable diversity levels, suggesting that their microbiota remained stable after treatment withdrawal, as shown in Figure 1A .
The change in Alloprevotella abundance in Group H was close to being statistically significant, showing a log2 fold-change of 1.58 with a p -value of 0.053.