How Should We Describe Risk-Reducing Treatments to Patients?

The way a physician describes the risks and benefits of a treatment likely influences a patient’s decision about it. To explore this hypothesis, researchers in Norway surveyed a community-based sample of nearly 3000 adults. Participants were randomly assigned to receive one of three different descriptions of benefits from hypothetical therapies — drugs to prevent heart attack or hip fracture: (1) number of patients that needed to be treated to avoid one event (NNT), (2) short-term postponement of an adverse event for all patients, or (3) longer-term postponement of an adverse event for a fraction of patients. For example, in the heart attack scenario, the NNT was 13 patients, and the postponement was either 2 months on average for all, or 8…