Absolute Risk Reduction (ARR) Measure
An Absolute Risk Reduction (ARR) Measure is a treatment effect measure between the control group’s event rate (CER) and the experimental group’s event rate (EER).
- AKA: Risk Difference, Absolute Effect.
- Context:
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Probability, Placebo, Control Event Rate, Experimental Event Rate, Number Needed-to-Treat, Relative Risk Reduction.
References
2016
- (Wikipedia, 2016) ⇒ https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Absolute_risk_reduction Retrieved 2016-07-24
- In epidemiology, the absolute risk reduction, risk difference or absolute effect is the change in the risk of an outcome of a given treatment or activity in relation to a comparison treatment or activity. It is the inverse of the number needed to treat.
In general, absolute risk reduction is the difference between one treatment comparison group's event rate (EER) and another comparison group’s event rate (CER). The difference is usually calculated with respect to two treatments A and B, with A typically a drug and B a placebo. For example, A could be a 5-year treatment with a hypothetical drug, and B is treatment with placebo, i.e. no treatment. A defined [[End point of clinical trials|endpoint]] has to be specified, such as a survival or a response rate. For example: the appearance of lung cancer in a 5-year period. If the probabilities pA and pB of this endpoint under treatments A and B, respectively, are known, then the absolute risk reduction is computed as (pB − pA).
The inverse of the absolute risk reduction, NNT, is an important measure in pharmacoeconomics. If a clinical endpoint is devastating enough (e.g. death, heart attack), drugs with a low absolute risk reduction may still be indicated in particular situations. If the endpoint is minor, health insurers may decline to reimburse drugs with a low absolute risk reduction.
- In epidemiology, the absolute risk reduction, risk difference or absolute effect is the change in the risk of an outcome of a given treatment or activity in relation to a comparison treatment or activity. It is the inverse of the number needed to treat.
2008
- (Irwig et al., 2008) ⇒ Irwig, L., Irwig, J., Trevena, L., & Sweet, M. (2008). Relative risk, relative and absolute risk reduction, number needed to treat and confidence intervals. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK63647/
- How do you interpret the results of a randomised controlled trial? A common measure of a treatment is to look at the frequency of bad outcomes of a disease in the group being treated compared with those who were not treated. For instance, supposing that a well-designed randomised controlled trial in children with a particular disease found that 20 per cent of the control group developed bad outcomes, compared with only 12 per cent of those receiving treatment. Should you agree to give this treatment to your child? Without knowing more about the adverse effects of the therapy, it appears to reduce some of the bad outcomes of the disease. But is its effect meaningful?
This is where you need to consider the risk of treatment versus no treatment. In healthcare, risk refers to the probability of a bad outcome in people with the disease.
Absolute risk reduction (ARR) – also called risk difference (RD) – is the most useful way of presenting research results to help your decision-making. In this example, the ARR is 8 per cent (20 per cent - 12 per cent = 8 per cent). This means that, if 100 children were treated, 8 would be prevented from developing bad outcomes. Another way of expressing this is the number needed to treat (NNT). If 8 children out of 100 benefit from treatment, the NNT for one child to benefit is about 13 (100 ÷ 8 = 12.5).
For technical reasons, some other measures are often used. The relative risk (RR) of a bad outcome in a group given intervention is a proportional measure estimating the size of the effect of a treatment compared with other interventions or no treatment at all. It is the proportion of bad outcomes in the intervention group divided by the proportion of bad outcomes in the control group. In this hypothetical case, the RR is 0.6 (12 per cent ÷ 20 per cent = 0.6).
When a treatment has an RR greater than 1, the risk of a bad outcome is increased by the treatment; when the RR is less than 1, the risk of a bad outcome is decreased, meaning that the treatment is likely to do good. For example, when the RR is 2.0 the chance of a bad outcome is twice as likely to occur with the treatment as without it, whereas an RR of 0.5 means that the chance of a bad outcome is twice as likely to occur without the intervention. When the RR is exactly 1, the risk is unchanged. For example, a report may state ‘The relative risk of blindness in people given drug T was 1.5’. This shows that the drug increased the risk of blindness. Another measure that is used is the odds ratio. For practical purposes, assume that the odds ratio is the same as the relative risk. Sometimes the outcome is a good one and the interpretation of relative risk is the opposite of what we have just outlined (...)
- How do you interpret the results of a randomised controlled trial? A common measure of a treatment is to look at the frequency of bad outcomes of a disease in the group being treated compared with those who were not treated. For instance, supposing that a well-designed randomised controlled trial in children with a particular disease found that 20 per cent of the control group developed bad outcomes, compared with only 12 per cent of those receiving treatment. Should you agree to give this treatment to your child? Without knowing more about the adverse effects of the therapy, it appears to reduce some of the bad outcomes of the disease. But is its effect meaningful?