Despite Depot Meds, Schizophrenia Patients Remain Non-Compliant

The failure among patients to take their meds is a costly matter. For instance, the avoidable cost opportunity for six prevalent diseases – including HIV, diabetes and high blood pressure - exceeded a whopping $105 billion last year, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. But with each disease comes different compliance – or adherence – issues. Take schizophrenia, which can pose quite different challenges. About 45 percent of these patients do not follow physician instructions when taking their medications and this represents an increase of four percentage points over 2012, according to a recent survey of 127 psychiatrists by GfK Communications, a market research firm. Since 2009, the level of non-compliance ranged from 41 percent to 46 percent. In the latest survey, 74 percent of psychiatrists cited patient dislike of medications as a reason for non-compliance and 71 percent cited side effects – the most common being Extrapyramidal symptoms and tremors, sleepiness and weight gain. What else? Well, 65 percent of psychiatrists say patients believe they are no longer ill - a common refrain, 46 percent pointed to substance abuse and 43 percent blamed forgetfulness. Despite the advent of long-acting ‘depot’ drugs, or injectables, which only need to be taken once a week or less and can reduce relapse rates, compliance has not substantially improved. These meds account for about 20 percent of all schizophrenia prescriptions, up from 18 percent last y...
Source: Pharmalot - Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs