If you spend any amount of time looking at clinical studies or doing literature evaluation, you’ll see the term Relative Risk thrown about liberally

Absolute Risk Reduction: Your Secret Weapon in Literature Evaluation

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2021-05-29 08:00:04

If you spend any amount of time looking at clinical studies or doing literature evaluation, you’ll see the term Relative Risk thrown about liberally. You’ll also see things like Odds Ratio, and Hazard Ratio on the regular.

It’s actually pretty rare (especially in my world of oncology) to see Absolute Risk Reduction reported in a study. You’ll find that you have to calculate it for yourself. But if it’s so important, why do you have to manually calculate it for most studies? Why isn’t it reported with the findings?

Simply put, Absolute Risk is less sexy than Relative Risk. It doesn’t make for good press headlines. If Absolute Risk is the Jan Brady of the research world, Relative Risk is its Marcia. In the world of press releases, Relative Risk is the younger, more attractive cousin of Absolute Risk.

Luckily, your literature evaluation skills don’t have to be hampered by a lack of reporting. Today I’m going to give you the best tool to separate the clinical wheat from the chaff. I’m going to teach you the absolute risk reduction formula and show you how to calculate absolute risk reduction.

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