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In Reply: We agree with Dr Young that the NNT can be useful for evaluating the effect of an intervention. The NNT is calculated as the reciprocal of the absolute risk reduction and describes the average number of participants who must be treated to prevent 1 occurrence of an event. The NNT is particularly effective when outcomes are discrete events.¹ For continuous outcomes, such as those measured in our study, threshold cutoffs for "clinically significant" changes need to be defined. While the use of different thresholds will necessarily result in different NNTs, clinically significant thresholds for the pediatric population are not well established.

Despite these shortcomings, NNT is a useful additional measure of the utility of our intervention. At enrollment, all of our participants had a BMI greater than the 95th percentile for age, which was our definition of obesity. In the control group, 0 of 69 resolved obesity during . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Mary Savoye, RD, CD-N, CDE
mary.savoye@yale.edu

James Dziura, PhD
Yale Center for Clinical Investigation
Yale University School of Medicine
New Haven, Connecticut

RELATED LETTER

Efficacy of a Weight Management Program in Overweight Children
Paul C. Young
JAMA. 2007;298(16):1860.
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