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Compliance to treatment
A F Schaub1, A Steiner, W Vetter
1Department of Internal Medicine, University Hospital, Zürich, Switzerland.
Insights
Achieving high patient compliance is crucial for successful long-term hypertension management. Factors beyond side effects, including patient demographics and quality of life, significantly impact adherence to treatment.
Area of Science:
- Cardiology
- Pharmacology
- Public Health
Background:
- Hypertension management requires high patient compliance for effective long-term therapy.
- Patient drop-out rates can serve as an indirect indicator of compliance.
- While drug side effects are known to affect adherence, other factors like age, sex, psychological status, and quality of life also play a significant role.
Purpose of the Study:
- To explore factors influencing patient compliance in hypertension management.
- To identify strategies for improving adherence to antihypertensive therapies.
Main Methods:
- Review of clinical studies examining patient compliance and drop-out rates in hypertension.
- Analysis of factors influencing long-term adherence to antihypertensive medication.
Main Results:
- Drug-related side effects negatively impact long-term compliance.
- Age, sex, psychological features, and quality of life are identified as important influencing factors.
- Strategies such as simplified prescriptions, minimizing concomitant medications, and careful dose titration enhance compliance.
Conclusions:
- Optimizing hypertension management necessitates a focus on patient compliance.
- Simple prescribing, reduced polypharmacy, cautious dose adjustments, self-blood pressure monitoring, and thorough patient education are key strategies to improve adherence.
Abstract:
One major challenge of hypertension management is to achieve a compliance rate as high as possible in order to guarantee a successful long-term antihypertensive therapy. Clinical studies have shown that the drop-out rate may represent an indirect parameter for patient compliance. As having a negative influence on long-term compliance drug related side effects are best known but newer results indicate that there are also other factors like age, sex, psychological features and quality of life do have important influence on compliance. For achieving the therapeutic aim strategies like simple prescription, few concomitant medication and cautious dose-titration have shown to be efficient. Additional blood pressure self-measurement and profound instruction are essential to optimize hypertension management in terms of compliance to treatment.