The way people take medication has an important impact on both its safety and its effectiveness. Dr Thomas Barron of Trinity College Dublin has just revealed that medication-taking behaviour is more complex than you might think. Persistence, when you continue to take your tablets, and adherence, which is taking medication in the right way, are two different aspects of medication-taking behaviour. You need to be doing both to get the maximum benefit from medication.

‘We believe there is a distinct difference between the patient who stops taking a drug altogether and the one who at least believes it is important, but does not take it correctly,’ says Barron. But conventional models of analyzing medication-taking behaviour do not really capture the differences between persistence and adherence. Barron developed a new model that is able to separate out these two elements of medication-taking behaviour. He worked with prescription refill data from nearly 80,000 patients taking statins to lower their cholesterol and pinpointed specific risk factors associated with persistence and adherence.

The findings open up the possibility of targeting interventions more precisely to the patient’s medication-taking behaviour. The non-persistent patient might need more persuasion that his or her tablets are needed. But those who have issues with adherence might be better served by special pill boxes to help them remember their medication. ‘Statins are a good example of medication where persistence and adherence may be poor, putting the patient at risk of heart disease,’ Barron says. ‘But this new model is also applicable to other kinds of medication.’

Source:

Susan Aldridge ‘Medication Safety’ Picture of Health 2009 Health Research Board page 7