Objective: To determine adherence to prescribed drug therapy in patients with Parkinson's disease Background: Physicians modify drug schedules in response to their patients' clinical responses. Failure to relieve patients' symptoms or the emergence of drug-related side effects may reflect non-adherence to a prescribed drug schedule rather than incorrect therapeutic physician decisions.
Methods: Using a medication questionnaire and a computerized medication event monitoring system (MEMS) to monitor medication use, nonadherence of drug use was examined in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Studied subjects excluded those with dementia, depression, or those who took drugs as needed.
Results: Prescription non-adherence in PD patients was common and approximated that reported in other chronic diseases. During a 28 day observation period, only 4/39 patients had complete schedule adherence, that is no missed, extra, or mistimed doses. Using a questionnaire, 24.3% of patients admitted to missing any doses but the computerized MEMS recorded that 51.3% of patients missed at least 1 dose/week and 20.5% of patients missed 3 or more doses/week. Mistiming of doses was admitted by 73% of patients but 82.1% had recorded mistimed doses. Of multiple socio-demographic and disease-related items examined, only gender and level of education were statistically related to non-compliance.
Conclusion: Adherence to a medication was significantly deficient in a majority of studied PD patients and approachs the rate of non-adherence reported in patients with other chronic diseases. P170 SLV318, a novel agonist for the dopamine D 2 and D 3 receptor: In vitro and in vivo neurochemical characterization