What is my risk, doctor? Let’s stop giving patients irrelevant information

Bretthauer and Kalager discuss the communication of risk.1 I think one difficulty is that most measures used in research are irrelevant to patients.Risk differences and ratios at 10 years are useful for setting policy. They are also useful for people who don’t care whether their cardiovascular event happens tomorrow or in nine years’ time and have no interest in their lives after the next decade.If someone takes statins but still has a cardiovascular event, we don’t tell them it was futile, but these measures do. For the health system, this is more or less right; a cardiovascular event was still treated, so we didn’t save money. For those people, it is clearly wrong. They are exactly the people who needed primary prevention to delay events as long as possible. To use these measures for “shared decision making” is to make this error in advance. They enforce the assumption that statins…
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