There is heart disease in my family, but I have nothing but a cholesterol level that’s been rising for 2 decades. I also – for unrelated reasons – had a full upper body MRI, and one of those audio thingies for arteries 7 years ago.
Here’s the NNT:
- None were helped (life saved)
- 1 in 60 were helped (preventing heart attack)
- 1 in 268 were helped (preventing stroke)
- 1 in 167 were harmed (develop diabetes*)
What’s NNT you may ask? It’s a restatement of results from the literature into a common metric of what fraction of people were helped or hurt.
In my case, this is a tough one: a better chance to prevent an acute problem, in exchange for a smaller change of developing a chronic one.
Yikes.
Via Bookofjoe.
