"Effective risk communication is essential to the well-being of any organization and those people who depend on it. Ineffective communication can cost lives, money, and reputations. Communicating Risks and Benefits: An Evidence-Based User's Guide provides the scientific foundations for effective communication."
This FDA document explains how relative risk reduction (RRR) can be a misleading indicator of a product's effectiveness, and the authors advise FDA personnel to provide absolute risk reduction (ARR) data for FDA-regulated products. However, the clinical trials for the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines only provided the RRR for those products.
"Chapter 1: Introduction
... Risk communication is the term of art used for situations when people need good information to make sound choices. It is distinguished from public affairs (or public relations) communication by its commitment to accuracy and its avoidance of spin. Having been spun adds insult to injury for people who have been hurt because they were inadequately informed. Risk communications must deal with the benefits that risk decisions can produce (e.g., profits from investments, better health from medical procedures), as well as the risks...
FDA regulates some 20% of the U.S. consumer economy, including food, drugs, medical devices, and dietary supplements. This guide applies not only to all those products, but to any situation with a duty or desire to inform...
Chapter 6: Definitions
... Another statistical choice is between reporting relative or absolute risks. Because there is no way to infer the latter from the former, absolute risks are always more informative. Doubling a risk means very different things if that entails going from 10% to 20% or from 0.001% to 0.002%...
Chapter 7: Quantitative Information
... Absolute risk, relative risk, and number needed to treat (NNT)
... [W]hen information is presented in a relative risk format, the risk reduction seems larger and treatments are viewed more favorably than when the same information is presented using an absolute
risk format. This is as true for the lay public as it is for medical students...
What general practical advice can the science support?
In this final section, we recommend ways to nudge individuals towards better comprehension and greater welfare. How to present information is an important choice for information providers that should be made with care using an evidence-based approach...
2. Provide absolute risks, not just relative risks. Patients are unduly influenced when risk information is presented using a relative risk approach; this can result in suboptimal decisions. Thus, an absolute risk format should be used...
Chapter 18: News Coverage
... Gigerenzer et al., 'provide evidence that statistical illiteracy (a) is common to patients, journalists, and physicians; (b) is created by nontransparent framing of information that is sometimes an unintentional result of lack of understanding, but can also be a result of intentional efforts to manipulate or persuade people; and (c) can have serious consequences for health.' The authors place
much of the blame on medical journals, 'surprisingly, nontransparent health statistics such as relative risks without the base rate often appear in leading medical journals, and it is often from these sources that the numbers spread to physicians, the media, and the public'...
Researchers offer practical advice for health care journalism improvement. Woloshin, Schwartz, and Kramer published an editorial, 'Promoting Healthy Skepticism in the News: Helping Journalists Get It Right'... They urged medical journals to 'work harder to promote the accurate translation of research into news' by 'ensuring that both the journal and the corresponding press releases routinely present absolute risks found in the study (or estimated, when possible, in case-control studies) to describe the effects of interventions and to highlight study limitations.'
Gigerenzer recommends that all health communicators — journalists included — use 'frequency statements instead of single-event probabilities, absolute risks instead of relative risks, mortality rates instead of survival rates, and natural frequencies instead of conditional probabilities.'"
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