Study: Nonadherence to Antihypertensive Treatment is Common

Between 30% and 40% of patients with hypertension do not take their antihypertensive medication as prescribed, according to the results of a recent study.

There is a lack of data on the risk factors of nonadherence to antihypertensive treatment, because few studies utilize objective-direct diagnostic methods, according to the researchers.
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To further explore this issue, researchers used high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry of urine and serum in order to detect nonadherence in 1348 participants with hypertension from the UK and the Czech Republic.

Overall, rates of nonadherence were 41.6% and 31.5% in the UK and Czech Republic, respectively, with each increase in the number of antihypertensive medications leading to an 85% and 77% increase in nonadherence, respectively.

Nonadherence was inversely related to age and male sex.

“We demonstrate that the number and class of prescribed antihypertensives are modifiable risk factors for biochemically confirmed nonadherence to blood pressure–lowering therapy,” the researchers concluded.

“Further development of discriminatory models incorporating these parameters might prove clinically useful in assessment of nonadherence in countries where biochemical analysis is unavailable.”

—Michael Potts

Reference:

Gupta P, Patel P, Strauch B, et al. Risk factors for nonadherence to antihypertensive treatment [published online May 1, 2017]. Hypertension. doi:https://doi.org/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.116.08729