![]() The tricky part is that for most treatments we don’t know which group a person undergoing treatment will end up in, the group that was helped, the group that was harmed, or the group that was unaffected. For the 50 percent in the middle, however, StopAttack was life-saving. These two groups are therefore unaffected by StopAttack, and the treatment neither helped nor hurt them. But note that 25 percent of people will die whether they get StopAttack or not (the bottom of the graph) and 25 percent will survive whether they get StopAttack or not (the top). This is certainly a major reduction in deaths. Imagine that 75 percent of heart attack victims who take StopAttack survive, but only 25 percent survive if they are not given StopAttack, as shown in the graph below. Imagine for instance a fictional heart attack treatment called ‘StopAttack’. The concept is statistical, but intuitive, for we know that not everyone is helped by a medicine or intervention - some benefit, some are harmed, and some are unaffected. The NNT offers a measurement of the impact of a medicine or therapy by estimating the number of patients that need to be treated in order to have an impact on one person. It is a simple statistical concept called the “Number-Needed-to-Treat”, or for short the ‘NNT’. ![]() ![]() There is a way of understanding how much modern medicine has to offer individual patients. The NNT Video Introduction The Basic Idea ![]()
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