Market Insight - What's in a number: the growing use of NNT
This article was originally published in Scrip
Executive Summary
Just over 20 years ago, doctors from Canada's University of Ottawa proposed a new and simple way of looking at the efficacy of a medical intervention: the number needed to treat (NNT). This is an easy way of measuring not only whether a drug accomplishes the physiological task it is intended to do, but whether that success really much matters. It is a metric that distinguishes not only between effective and ineffective drugs, but also between drugs that do their job and improve health and those that do their job but do not really change the status of most patients.