Objectives:
What is a risk?
What is Absolute and relative risks?
Absolute versus relative risk
Relative risk tells you nothing about actual risk
Keeping a sense of proportion about risk
What is risk?
Simply put, the ‘risk’ of something happening is its chance of taking place.
Absolute and relative risks?
Absolute risk of a disease is your risk of developing the disease over a time period. We all have absolute risks of developing various diseases such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, etc. The same absolute risk can be expressed in different ways. For example, say you have a 1 in 10 risk of developing a certain disease in your life. This can also be said to be a 10% risk, or a 0.1 risk - depending on whether you use percentages or decimals. …show more content…
But we can also say it happens a quarter of the time or 25 per cent of the time. the absolute risk of picking any Heart is 25 per cent (so 25 in 100 or one in four). But the absolute risk of picking the Queen of Diamonds, as poker players may know, is much lower – it’s just one card among 52 which works out as just under 2 per cent.
So we can say that the risk of picking any Heart is over ten times greater than picking the Queen of Diamonds. We’ve just compared two risks and come up with a relative risk a way of comparing risks to find out how much more likely one is compared to the other.
Absolute versus relative risks
So, quick recap risk is the chance of something happening, and as we have seen, there are different ways of describing a risk. They do not change the actual risk itself, but different ways of describing the same risk can profoundly affect how we perceive it. But what about comparing risks?
The actual risk itself is often referred to as the absolute risk. And as we have seen, the higher the absolute risk is, the more likely it is that the something will happen – though it still isn’t guaranteed to take place.
Relative risk tells you nothing about actual
What is a risk?
What is Absolute and relative risks?
Absolute versus relative risk
Relative risk tells you nothing about actual risk
Keeping a sense of proportion about risk
What is risk?
Simply put, the ‘risk’ of something happening is its chance of taking place.
Absolute and relative risks?
Absolute risk of a disease is your risk of developing the disease over a time period. We all have absolute risks of developing various diseases such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, etc. The same absolute risk can be expressed in different ways. For example, say you have a 1 in 10 risk of developing a certain disease in your life. This can also be said to be a 10% risk, or a 0.1 risk - depending on whether you use percentages or decimals. …show more content…
But we can also say it happens a quarter of the time or 25 per cent of the time. the absolute risk of picking any Heart is 25 per cent (so 25 in 100 or one in four). But the absolute risk of picking the Queen of Diamonds, as poker players may know, is much lower – it’s just one card among 52 which works out as just under 2 per cent.
So we can say that the risk of picking any Heart is over ten times greater than picking the Queen of Diamonds. We’ve just compared two risks and come up with a relative risk a way of comparing risks to find out how much more likely one is compared to the other.
Absolute versus relative risks
So, quick recap risk is the chance of something happening, and as we have seen, there are different ways of describing a risk. They do not change the actual risk itself, but different ways of describing the same risk can profoundly affect how we perceive it. But what about comparing risks?
The actual risk itself is often referred to as the absolute risk. And as we have seen, the higher the absolute risk is, the more likely it is that the something will happen – though it still isn’t guaranteed to take place.
Relative risk tells you nothing about actual