concepts
Number needed to treat (NNT) is a clinical epidemiology measure describing how many patients must receive a given treatment, on average, to prevent one additional adverse outcome (such as a disease diagnosis or death) compared with not treating them. It is calculated as the inverse of the absolute risk reduction between a treated and untreated (or placebo) group. A lower NNT indicates a more efficient, more targeted therapy, and NNT is commonly used to judge whether a preventive intervention is practical to deploy across a population versus only in a biomarker-defined higher-risk subgroup.
Source papers
- Plasma signals of lung tumor promotion for molecular cancer prevention doi:10.1016/j.cell.2026.05.005