The role of media on statin adherence

Koçaş C., Abacı O., Koçaş B., Çetinkal G., Arslan Ş., Yıldız A., ...Daha Fazla

Uluslararası Katılımlı 31. Türk Kardiyoloji Kongresi, Antalya, Türkiye, 22 - 25 Ekim 2015, ss.11, (Özet Bildiri)

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Antalya
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.11
  • İstanbul Üniversitesi-Cerrahpaşa Adresli: Evet

Özet

Introduction: Medication adherence is a complex problem that is affected by many factors, including perceptions

and understanding of the disease burden. Specific factors identified as low socioeconomic status,

high medication costs, lack of transportation, poor understanding of medication instructions, and long wait

times at the pharmacy. In addition, media coverage of health facts has an impact on beliefs, attitudes and

behaviours related to health. In recent years, statins were frequently criticised in Turkish newspapers and

television channels and most of them were presented in negative fashion. Our goal was to analyze the effects

media on statin adherence.

Materials and Method: We retrospectively analyzed the statin adherence of 908 percutaneous coronary

intervention patients whom were prescribed a statin before 2011 at our institute and had continuous insurance

coverage to determine statin adherence. We used the pharmacy-based proportion of days covered

(PDC) method to quantify statin adherence. Statin adherence was categorized according to two PDC cut-off

values according to previous studies; PDC ≥80% and PDC ≥50%. To quantify the effects of media; we made

a search on Google. We searched the word “cholesterol drugs” on Turkish pages from “news” section.

Results: Search on Google retrieved; 2320 news in 2011, 6210 news in 2012, 5170 news in 2013 and 3070 news

in 2014. As news about statins increased from 2011 to 2013, statin adherent patients according to PDC ≥50%

criteria decreased significantly (55% in 2011, 54% in 2012 and 50 % in 2013, p=0.03). whereas fully adherent

patients (PDC ≥80%) did not decrease from 2011 to 2013 (25% in 2011, 27% in 2012 and 26% in 2013, p=0.62).

Discussion and Conclusion: There are several important findings in our study; first, statin adherence was

significantly lower compared to previous studies, second although fully adherent patients continue to take

their statins, patients with medium statin adherence group significantly decreased and these findings identified

the role of media on medication adherence.