Statistical Analysis
The data and statistical analysis comply with the recommendations of the
British Journal of Pharmacology on experimental design and analysis in
pharmacology (Curtis et al., 2018). All data were obtained from five
independent experiments (i.e. not treating technical replicates as
independent values) and expressed as means ± S.E.M. WB and PCR data were
normalized to the values of the control group (100% or 1, respectively)
and expressed as mean ± S.E.M. Statistical analysis was undertaken only
for studies where each group size was at least n = 5, where n = number
of independent values. Animals were separated into groups randomly, and
the groups were randomized into drug-treated or control group before
treatments. For blinding, experimentation and analysis involved
different persons. The total number of mice used in the present study
was 108, all data are expressed as means ± S.E.M. group sizes across all
experiments were n = 12. Student’s t test was used to compare the means
of two groups, while statistical significance for multiple groups was
determined by ANOVA. a P < 0.05 was considered statistically
significant. (*P < 0.05, **P < 0.01,
***P < 0.001, and ****P < 0.0001). All
statistical analyses were carried out with GraphPad Prism 7.0 from
GraphPad Software Inc., CA, USA. For statistical analysis, Prism(Version
5.0d, GraphPad Software, San Diego, CA, USA) was used.