Medicines adherence

Last month, the research round-up provided you with an overview of a drug newly recommended to UK prescribers for amyloid cardiomyopathy. This month, we will look at three articles on the subject of medicines adherence. The first is an umbrella review of medication adherence in patients with kidney disease. The second examines cost-related non-adherence in the area of COPD prescribing. Finally, we summarise a systematic review of medicines adherence in depression.

This article, published in Advances in Kidney Disease and Health, outlines an umbrella review, which looked at levels of adherence to medications in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD).

The review of other systematic reviews and meta-analysis publications was conducted with a robust methodology using the PRIOR statement (Gates et al, 2022). Relevant databases were chosen to search and a comprehensive search strategy including study selection and quality assessment is seen in the published article. After screening, 37 reviews spanning the past 20 years were included in the umbrella review. The review presents the results under four major categories: prevalence of treatment non-adherence; factors associated with (non) adherence; clinical and patient-reported outcomes associated with treatment non-adherence; and interventions implemented to improve treatment adherence.