Prescription Medication Adherence Low Among Patients With Chronic Health Conditions

For patients with chronic health conditions, a team of researchers found that oftentimes this patient population are prescribed multiple medications, including non-prescription medications, and are at a higher risk to be non-adherent to the prescription medications. The study findings were published online in the International Journal of Clinical Practice.  

“Non‐adherence to prescribed medicines is linked to adverse health outcomes in people living with chronic health conditions,” study authors wrote. “Multiple factors are known to contribute to non‐adherence to medicines including polypharmacy, demographic features and disease and health systems.”  

“Both non‐prescription and prescription medicines contribute to polypharmacy however, there is limited data of the influence of non‐prescription medicines to non‐adherence.” 

In order to understand the influence of nonprescription medicines to non-adherence, researchers used data from the 2016 National Survey of a random sample of Australian adult residents. In order to assess adherence rates, descriptive statistics, Chi-square, regression, and generalized linear models were used. The study authors identified 1217 participants.

“Weak, but statistically significant correlations were identified showing the number of chronic health conditions, patient's age, number of prescription medicines, number of non-prescription medicines and total number of medicines were associated with non-adherence,” the authors explained.  

Overall, the study authors concluded that patients with chronic health conditions who take multiple medications, which include non-prescription meds, are at a higher risk to be non-adherent.  

Although this study shows the involvement of non-prescription medications correlating to non-adherence, the study authors said that future studies are still needed. They suggested that future studies have a broader demographic to gain a better understanding.  

—Julie Gould  

Reference:

Anoopkumar-Dukie S, Mey A, Hall S, Bernaitis N, Davey AK, Plummer D. Non-Prescription Medicines may Contribute to Non-Adherence to Prescription Medicines in People in Living with Chronic Health Conditions [published online ahead of print, 2020 Feb 21]. Int J Clin Pract. 2020;e13489. doi:10.1111/ijcp.13489