gms | German Medical Science

42. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Rheumatologie, 28. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Orthopädische Rheumatologie, 24. Wissenschaftliche Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Kinder- und Jugendrheumatologie

17.-20. September 2014, Düsseldorf

Article

Send article

Compliance-questionnaire-rheumatology exposes low non-adherence to oral DMARDs in rheumatoid arthritis patients

Meeting Abstract

Search Medline for

  • Veronika Rauscher - Universitätsklinikum Erlangen, Medizinische Klinik 3, Rheumatologie und Immunologie, Erlangen
  • Matthias Englbrecht - Universitätsklinikum Erlangen, Medizinische Klinik 3, Rheumatologie und Immunologie, Erlangen
  • Desiree van der Heijde - Leiden University Medical Center, Department of Rheumatology, Leiden, The Netherlands
  • Georg Schett - Universitätsklinikum Erlangen, Medizinische Klinik 3, Rheumatologie und Immunologie, Erlangen
  • Axel Hueber - Universitätsklinikum Erlangen, Medizinische Klinik 3, Rheumatologie und Immunologie, Erlangen

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rheumatologie. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Orthopädische Rheumatologie. Gesellschaft für Kinder- und Jugendrheumatologie. 42. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Rheumatologie (DGRh); 28. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Orthopädische Rheumatologie (DGORh); 24. wissenschaftliche Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Kinder- und Jugendrheumatologie (GKJR). Düsseldorf, 17.-20.09.2014. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2014. DocEV.13

doi: 10.3205/14dgrh186, urn:nbn:de:0183-14dgrh1861

Published: September 12, 2014

© 2014 Rauscher et al.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.en). You are free: to Share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work, provided the original author and source are credited.

Outline

Text

Background: Adherence, which combines taking compliance, medication adherence and persistence, is an important part of the effectiveness of the therapy in patients with chronic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Few studies investigated adherence to drug therapy in patients with RA in which adherence rates have been reported to range from 20% to 100%. In this study, we tested adherence with the clinical questionnaire rheumatology (CQR) to gain a real life experience on the present situation on adherence to disease modifying anti-rheumatic drug treatment.

Methods: 240 RA patients were invited to participate in this study by letter. Three months after patients had taken part in the first questioning they were sent the same set of questionnaires in order to follow-up. Drug compliance was evaluated using the CQR 80% cut-off scores for taking compliance and correct dosing proposed by de Klerk et al. (2003). With symptom severity and side-effects possibly being related to drug adherence, we set the 80% cut-offs coming from the weighted CQR-scores into relation to patient-reported severity of symptoms according to acceptable symptom status of the Rheumatoid Arthritis Impact of Disease Questionnaire (RAID).

Results: Return rate of the CQR was moderate with 53% (128 patients). 84 patients treated with conventional DMARDs and of that 68 patients provided full information on the CQR. At baseline, 8 patients in the DMARD subgroup (11.8%) were classified as adherent according to the weighted CQR-score while only 2 patients (2.9%) were categorized adherent in view of correct dosing. At follow-up, 12 patients (19.7 %) achieved a result above the cut off in taking compliance and 3 (4.9%) in correct dosing. Interestingly, non-adherence did not correlate with disease activity or side effects.

Conclusion: In this study we demonstrate a low adherence to disease modifying anti-rheumatic drug treatment. Only 12 to 20% of RA patients adhere to their assigned treatment regimen suggesting substantial differences between doctors’ records and patients practice of anti-rheumatic drug therapy.