Time to benefit and time to harm for anticoagulation. Time to benefit is the time until a medication's effect is evident. Time to harm is the time until a medication's harm is evident. Time to benefit is longer for AF (years) than VTE (weeks to months), while harm from bleeding occurs most often with anticoagulant initiation. Patients with shorter life expectancies (shown in gray) may die before accruing benefits from anticoagulation, especially for AF (shaded light blue) vs VTE (shaded green) but can still experience harms (shaded red) given the short time to harm.