Treatment burden in multimorbidity: an integrative review

People living with multimorbidity experience increased treatment burden, which can result in poor health outcomes. Despite previous efforts to grasp the concept of treatment burden, the treatment burden of people living with multimorbidity has not been thoroughly explored, which may limit our understanding of treatment burden in this population. This study aimed to identify the components, contributing factors, and health outcomes of treatment burden in people with multiple diseases to develop an integrated map of treatment burden experienced by people living with multimorbidity. The second aim of this study is to identify the treatment burden instruments used to evaluate people living with multimorbidity and assess the comprehensiveness of the instruments.

This integrative review was conducted using the electronic databases MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and reference lists of articles through May 2023. All empirical studies published in English were included if they explored treatment burden among adult people living with multimorbidity. Data extraction using a predetermined template was performed.

Thirty studies were included in this review. Treatment burden consisted of four healthcare tasks and the social, emotional, and financial impacts that these tasks imposed on people living with multimorbidity. The context of multimorbidity, individual's circumstances, and how available internal and external resources affected treatment burden. We explored that an increase in treatment burden resulted in non-adherence to treatment, disease progression, poor health status and quality of life, and caregiver burden. Three instruments were used to measure treatment burden in living with multimorbidity. The levels of comprehensiveness of the instruments regarding healthcare tasks and impacts varied. However, none of the items addressed the healthcare task of ongoing prioritization of the tasks.

We developed an integrated map illustrating the relationships between treatment burden, the context of multimorbidity, people's resources, and the health outcomes. None of the existing measures included an item asking about the ongoing process of setting priorities among the various healthcare tasks, which highlights the need for improved measures. Our findings provide a deeper understanding of treatment burden in multimorbidity, but more research for refinement is needed. Future studies are also needed to develop strategies to comprehensively capture both the healthcare tasks and impacts for people living with multimorbidity and to decrease treatment burden using a holistic approach to improve relevant outcomes.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/UF46V.