Evidence Based Drug Therapy : What Do the Numbers Mean?

UBC Faculty Research and Publications

Evidence Based Drug Therapy : What Do the Numbers Mean? Therapeutics Initiative (University of British Columbia)

Description

Therapeutics Letter 15 considers what clinicians and their patients need to know about relative risk (RR), relative risk reduction (RRR), absolute risk reduction (ARR), and numbers needed to treat (NTT). Benefits in clinical trials are most often presented in trial reports and advertisements as RR (risk ratio) or RRR; these can often be misleading to clinicians and patients. In fact, clinicians and patients make different drug therapy decisions, depending on the way the results are presented. The ARR and NNT give a much better appreciation of the magnitude of the benefit and of the potential for a positive impact in your practice. Other essential parameters to be considered are the importance of the outcome to the patient and the time required to achieve the benefit.

Item Metadata

Title	Evidence Based Drug Therapy : What Do the Numbers Mean?
Alternate Title	Therapeutics Letter 15
Creator	Therapeutics Initiative (University of British Columbia)
Date Issued	1996-10
Description	Therapeutics Letter 15 considers what clinicians and their patients need to know about relative risk (RR), relative risk reduction (RRR), absolute risk reduction (ARR), and numbers needed to treat (NTT). Benefits in clinical trials are most often presented in trial reports and advertisements as RR (risk ratio) or RRR; these can often be misleading to clinicians and patients. In fact, clinicians and patients make different drug therapy decisions, depending on the way the results are presented. The ARR and NNT give a much better appreciation of the magnitude of the benefit and of the potential for a positive impact in your practice. Other essential parameters to be considered are the importance of the outcome to the patient and the time required to achieve the benefit.
Subject	Numbers Needed To Treat; Odds Ratio; Risk; Statistics as Topic
Genre	Other
Type	Text
Language	eng
Notes	The UBC TI is funded by the BC Ministry of Health to provide evidence-based information about drug therapy. We neither formulate nor adjudicate provincial drug policies.
Date Available	2023-06-20
Provider	Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Rights	Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
DOI	10.14288/1.0433594
URI	http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85004
Affiliation	Medicine, Faculty of; Anesthesiology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Department of
Peer Review Status	Reviewed
Scholarly Level	Faculty; Researcher
Rights URI	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Aggregated Source Repository	DSpace

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