NNT (Number Needed to Treat)

Number Needed to Treat (NNT) is “a measurement of the impact of a medicine or therapy [that estimates] the number of patients that need to be treated in order to have an impact on one person.”  A perfect NNT would be one ”” treat one person, and one person benefits.  The higher the NNH, the better.

A group of emergency medicine physicians recently launched the site www.TheNNT.com for the purpose of aggregating information from studies about the effectiveness of different treatments.  It’s really pretty neat (yes, I’m a boomer) and I’m going to tell my docs about it.