Number needed to treat in COPD: exacerbations versus pneumonias

Number needed to treat in COPD: exacerbations versus pneumonias.

BACKGROUND Several recent trials in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) have assessed the effectiveness of the fluticasone-salmeterol combination inhaler in preventing COPD exacerbations, while finding an increased risk of pneumonia. The number needed to treat (NNT) is a simple measure to perform the comparative benefit-risk impact, but its calculation involving repeated outcome events...

Number needed to treat in COPD: exacerbations versus pneumonias

Received 9 September 2012 Accepted 8 October 2012 ABSTRACT Background Several recent trials in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) have assessed the effectiveness of the fluticasone–salmeterol combination inhaler in preventing COPD exacerbations, while finding an increased risk of pneumonia. The number needed to treat (NNT) is a simple measure to perform the comparative benefit–risk im...

Author's response to letter on number needed to treat in COPD: exacerbations versus pneumonias.

I thank Keene et al for their letter. I am pleased to clarify the issues they have raised about my paper. First, I agree that when dealing with recurrent events such as exacerbations, it is statistically more informative to analyse all events with tools such as incidence rates and rate differences. The point of my paper, however, was that inverting these rate differences and calling the result ...

Number needed to treat: enigmatic results for exacerbations in COPD.

The number needed to treat (NNT), a simple tool to quantify the effectiveness or harm of a treatment, has been used in several studies of treatment for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) [1, 2]. It provides the number of patients that need to be treated with the study drug for a given period of time, relative to the comparator, to prevent one patient from having the outcome event, e.g...

Number Needed to Treat