It’s always possible, unless and until proven NOT to be the case in the particular instance, that an immunological method will mistake one compound for another.
So, yes it’s possible that the study was wrong on not just T, but DHT as well.
This problem has a lot to do with the fact that doctors and exercise scientists, and no doubt many others, have the horrible habit of only referring to tests according to what they are INTENDED to measure, and never stop and think about what is actually measured.
What is actually measured here is binding to an anti-testosterone (or anti-DHT) antibody.
If they reported what was actually measured, level of binding to anti-testosterone antibody, then this would be accurate. The error would be on the reader’s part if he ASSumed that everything that bound to the antibody was testosterone.
But instead, because the test is INTENDED to measure testosterone and they don’t stop and think about what is actually measured, they claim that testosterone was measured and was such and such a value.
It gets even worse in medicine. For example, before testing for HIV DNA, which so far as I know comes out positive only when HIV is present, the only test used to be one for presence of antibodies that bound HIV. This was on the theory that well, if a person has antibodies that bind an HIV antigen, then probably they have them on account of their immune systems having been exposed to HIV, though in fact there are other ways this can happen.
But of course, instead of calling this a test for HIV antibodies, they called it a test for HIV, and doctors in general did not think about what was being measured, probably 95% of them did not know what was being measured, and treated it as if HIV were what was being detected.
So a lot of people were told they had HIV when they did not, where instead they had been exposed to some other antigen for which it happens that the resulting antibody will also bind the HIV antigen. Imagine how fun that is, being told you have HIV when you don’t, the error occurring because the doctor did not understand what the test measures.
For that matter, a doctor told my family that my father had a cyst in the brain “the size of a grapefruit” of which he accoridng to the doctor had only a 1 in 5000 chance of surviving, when he had nothing but swelling with water from a stroke, because the doctor did not understand what an MRI measures.
It seems very basic, and it is, that someone involved in the sciences, whether directly or as an end-user as a doctor is, would understand it’s important to know what tests actually measure. But it’s an enormously high percentage of the time that they do not and don’t even have a clue that they are missing anything.
The most generous explanation for the Baylor study is this, that they did not understand what their analytical method measured. (If they did understand it but published this anyway, then that is worse, so let’s assume it was lack of understanding.)
