The role of numeracy in understanding the benefit of screening mammography

benefits may be meaningful only to patients who have some facility with basic probability and numerical con-cepts, a construct called numeracy. Objective: To assess the relation between numeracy and the ability to make use of typical risk reduction expressions about the benefit of screening mammography. Design: Randomized, cross-sectional survey Setting: A simple random sample of 500 female veterans drawn from a New England registry. Intervention: One of four questionnaires, which differed only in how the same information on average risk reduc-tion with mammography was presented. Measurements: Numeracy was scored as the total num-ber of correct responses to three simple tasks. Participants estimated their risk for death from breast cancer with an