MétaCan
Menu
← Back to cohort
Record W4239154575 · doi:10.1183/13993003.01449-2015

Number needed to treat: enigmatic results for exacerbations in COPD

2015· letter· en· W4239154575 on OpenAlexaff
Samy Suissa

Bibliographic record

VenueEuropean Respiratory Journal · 2015
Typeletter
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicChronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Research
Canadian institutionsMcGill UniversityJewish General Hospital
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNumber needed to treatCOPDMedicinePulmonary diseaseIntensive care medicineIncidence (geometry)Event (particle physics)Confidence intervalInternal medicineRelative riskMathematics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

S. Lettis and O. Keene raise questions about my paper on some misleading uses of the number needed to treat (NNT) for study outcomes such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) exacerbations. Certainly, when dealing with recurrent events such as exacerbations, it is statistically more informative to analyse all events with tools such as incidence rates, rate ratios and rate differences. However, some critical assumptions about the rates are essential to obtain valid estimates of these measures and, consequently, a valid estimate of the NNT. “Event-based” numbers needed to treat, such as those from the TORCH trial, should be used with extreme caution

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.026
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.175
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.039
Threshold uncertainty score0.136

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0260.175
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0030.002
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0030.005
Scholarly communication0.0040.008
Open science0.0030.002
Research integrity0.0390.048
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.007

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.

Opus teacher head0.064
GPT teacher head0.338
Teacher spread0.274 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

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".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2015
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueEuropean Respiratory Journal→Same topicChronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Research→French-language works237,207→