Attributable risk

Attributable risk is a big fancy term that means how much more likely something bad is to happen because of another thing.

Let’s say you like to eat cookies but your mom tells you not to eat too many because they are bad for you. Eating too many cookies can make you sick or get a tummy ache.

You decide to eat 5 cookies and you get a tummy ache. Your mom says it’s because you ate too many cookies. But was it really just because you ate too many cookies? There might be other reasons why you got a tummy ache, like you didn’t drink enough water or you were running around too much.

So how do we know for sure if it was the cookies that made you sick? We can use something called attributable risk. This means we figure out how much more likely you were to get sick because of the cookies.

If you had eaten just one cookie, you might have been fine. But because you ate 5 cookies, your chances of getting a tummy ache were much higher. The difference in your chances of getting sick if you had only eaten 1 cookie versus 5 cookies is the attributable risk.

So now we know that the tummy ache you got was most likely because you ate too many cookies, because the risk of getting a tummy ache was much higher when you ate 5 cookies compared to just one.

Attributable risk can be used for lots of other things too, like figuring out how much more likely you are to get sick from smoking or not wearing a helmet when you ride your bike. It helps us understand how one thing can affect another thing and helps us make better decisions about our health and safety.