Website evaluates medical treatments by number needed to treat (NNT) and number harmed

Parent Cafe
1

http://www.thennt.com/home-nnt/

Note: NNT is number needed to treat for one person to get the desired prevention or cure.

Some procedures, like stents for stable coronary artery disease and PSA screening for prostate cancer, show no benefit but significant chance of harm. Some others, such as statins for heart disease prevention (without known heart disease) showed benefits, but also more frequent harms (e.g. for this example, 1 in 104 helped by preventing heart attack and 1 in 154 helped by preventing stroke, but 1 in 50 harmed by developing diabetes and 1 in 10 harmed with muscle damage).

2

Interesting… but can you make sense of this:

http://www.thennt.com/nnt/aspirin-preventing-first-heart-attack-stroke/

compared to this

http://www.thennt.com/nnt/aspirin-to-prevent-a-first-heart-attack-or-stroke-2/

???

3

Two different analyses. They both reach the same conclusion. The one ending in -2 is older.

4

Very interesting. I’m trying to make sense of data regarding bilateral mastectomy for DCIS. I am alarmed at the number of T0 diagnoses resulting in bilateral mastectomies, often with one breast removed for prophylactic reasons. I know of several young women, with no gene issues, little or no family history of breast css as vet undergoing this process.