Background: Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is a common statistical technique in physiological
research, and often one or more of the independent/predictor variables such as dose, time, or age,
can be treated as a continuous, rather than a categorical variable during analysis – even if subjects
were randomly assigned to treatment groups. While this is not common, there are a number of
advantages of such an approach, including greater statistical power due to increased precision, a
simpler and more informative interpretation of the results, greater parsimony, and transformation
of the predictor variable is possible.