NNT, number needed to treat: does it have any real value?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Clinical trials usually use the relative risk (rate ratio or hazard ratio) to compare the effects of one treatment modality with others. However, the numbers needed to treat/harm (NNT/NNH) are sometimes used as another way of presenting an estimate of the effect of a medical intervention, pointing at the number of patients needed to be exposed over a certain period of time in order to achieve one beneficial or adverse event. For clinicians and patients, this is a very simple and clear tool to demonstrate the consequences of a specific intervention. Epidemiologists and statisticians are more cautious with interpretations of data of that sort. This article brings the relevant perspectives of a clinician, an epidemiologist and a statistician in regard to the value of NNT/NNH.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.156 | 0.509 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".