Wednesday, September 27, 20061
Number needed to treat
Slate with a nice article on NNT - a statistic that is not advertised in many pharmaceutical studies:
In June, the New York Times ran an article headlined, "Breast-Feed or Else." It suggested that experts believe that "breast-fed babies are at lower risk for sudden infant death syndrome and serious chronic diseases later in life, including asthma, diabetes, leukemia and some forms of lymphoma." Yet, the article never mentions the NNT for breast-feeding to prevent these scary diseases. Neither does any general-interest press article in LexisNexis, a database. There's a reason for this omission: The NNTs are astronomically high. Reasonable women might think that breast-feeding isn't worth the troubleÂa conclusion that you don't want drawn if you're promoting breast-feeding at any cost.
Comments
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Diora
This has been one of my pet peeves forever. It's not just pharmaceutical companies that love to use relative risk instead of NNT, doctors routinely use RRR, including Kevin in his statin post some time ago. And if one looks at actual studies, NNT is indeed mentioned most of the time. Or can be calculated from the data. And before you use "lawsuits" as an explanation, what danger is a lawsuit while writing in a blog or a website? Yet there are many doctors' blogs, websites, boards that use relative risk reduction instead of NNT or absolute risk. Check out cholesterol board on a WebMD website. The doctor that answers questions there routinely uses relative risk reduction to convince people who complain about side effects they do have. Even people whose heart attack risk doesn't appear that great from the posts.
Post a Comment »And it applies to all chronic desease prevention, screening as well as preventive drugs.
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