The answer might surprise you.
Which medication in modern medicine saves the most lives? How do we even measure pharmaceutical life-saving ability? And why should you, as a patient or healthcare provider, care?
Understanding Life-Saving Medications
We are lucky to live in an age with a growing number of both life-enhancing and life-saving medications. The weight loss GLP-1 drugs are the newest addition to this ever-increasing list.
Most of the medication tools in Western medicine did not exist even 100 years ago. Now, with so many prescription options that prolong the human lifespan, how do we prioritize them all? It’s a good problem to have.
We live in an increasingly frenetic world dominated by a growing social media presence that rewards enticing tag lines at the expense of expanded attention spans. With all this competing device-driven chatter, how do we focus on data-driven decisions that save the most lives?
Measuring Life-Saving Impact: The “Number Needed to Treat”
“Number needed to treat” (NNT) is one of the best methods to measure how life-saving and impactful a medication truly is. “Number needed to treat” is a statistical measurement that tells us the number of patients that need to be treated with a drug to prevent one additional bad outcome.
Comparing Aspirin and Statins: Familiar Medications with Higher NNTs
For example, the NNT for Aspirin is 265. This means that for every 265 people who are prescribed Aspirin to reduce adverse cardiac events, we will prevent one non-fatal stroke or heart attack.
In the case of cholesterol-lowering medications known as statins, you need to treat at least 60 people with this type of medication to prevent one heart attack and 268 people to prevent one stroke.
Not bad. I’d rather live in a world full of aspirin and statins than a world without them. But, that is still putting a lot of folks on medications that have real side effects and cost money before seeing any life-saving results.
Why NNT Matters for Prioritizing Medications
What drug therapy has the most powerful number needed to treat? In other words, where should we focus our time, energy, and attention? Which medication has the most bang for our very hurried American buck?
The fewer people required to be treated to save a life, the more impactful the treatment. So, a lower NNT has a more pronounced life-saving effect than a higher NNT.
The Top Life-Saving Medications: Insulin and Buprenorphine
As it turns out, only two medications boast a number that is needed to treat close to or in the single digits. Any guesses?
These two treatments should be the superstars of the prescription world. The Olympic gold medal-winning Taylor Swift of medications. The very best of the best. These two medications deserve a huge billboard sign on every highway touting their life-saving potential. Any guesses?
Coming in at second place with an NNT around 15 is……insulin. Big round of applause! Studies place the actual NNT somewhere between 14-19. This means it takes less than twenty patients treated with insulin to prevent one event of serious, symptomatic low blood sugar, including sweating, dizziness, confusion, seizure, and potential death. That’s fewer patients than many busy providers see in one day. Pretty potent stuff. Take a bow, insulin.
The Life-Saving Champion: Buprenorphine
But even awesome insulin, busy saving lives right and left, pales in comparison to the number one most life-saving drug.
This treatment has an unbelievable number needed to treat of TWO. You read that right-two! That means that one life is saved for every two people taking this medication. Whoa. Suddenly, insulin is a distant second.
The medication clocking in at number one most lifesaving medication is buprenorphine. This is the FDA-approved addiction medication used to treat and stabilize opioid use disorder.
For every two people prescribed buprenorphine, we will save one life. No other medicine even comes close to buprenorphine’s life-saving potential. We should shout this from rooftops. Or, in my case, from my very ordinary suburban front porch.
Raising Awareness of Buprenorphine’s Impact
Whether you are a healthcare provider or a patient, consider talking to everyone you know about the disease of addiction and the life-saving medications like buprenorphine that are now available.
Everyone now knows somebody struggling with addiction. The reality is that addiction does not distinguish between race, geography, occupation, political party, or income level. You never know who you might save.
With a disease that kills more than one hundred thousand young Americans each year, we need more of the world to know about some of our most powerful medicinal weapons. Grab your megaphone. Or your pen. Or simply repost this. Buprenorphine saves lives.
