Years-needed-to-treat to add 1 year of life: a new metric to estimate treatment effects in randomized trials

摘要

Aims A standard metric to estimate absolute treatment effects is numbers-needed-to-treat (NNT), which implicitly assumes that all benefits reverse at trial-end. However, in-trial survival benefits typically do not reverse until long after trial-end, so that NNT will substantially underestimate lifetime benefits.