[Evaluation of patient compliance among hypertensive patients treated by specialists].
OBJECTIVE
To evaluate compliance with antihypertensive therapy by a self-report in patients referred to hypertension specialists.


METHODS
We studied 484 treated hypertensive subjects referred to several hypertension clinics and who were treated since at least one year. Patients were asked to fill in the Compliance Evaluation Test (CET), a questionnaire with 6 questions previously validated to assess factors that could affect medication compliance. We defined patients as "good compliant" when "No" was answered to the 6 items, as "minor noncompliant" when 1 or 2 "Yes" were answered, and as "noncompliant" when 3 or more "Yes" were answered. A good agreement was demonstrated between CET score and compliance evaluated by the number of pills missed during the previous month according to patient interview.


RESULTS
We observed 8% of "noncompliant", 53% of "minor noncompliant" and 39% of "good compliant". [table: see text] Logistic regression analysis including age, sex, education level, blood pressure level and the number of antihypertensive tablets confirm the statistical differences observed.


CONCLUSIONS
In clinical practice, a method of assessing medication compliance is to ask the patient for a self-report interview. We demonstrated that the compliance evaluation test is able to detect factors usually associated with poor compliance (young age, elevated blood pressure, number of tablets per day). The use of the compliance evaluation test may help physicians to face the problem of nonadherence among their hypertensive patients.
Girerd
X
X
Service de médecine interne, hôpital Broussais, 96, rue Didot, 75014 Paris.
Radauceanu
A
A
Achard
J M
JM
Fourcade
J
J
Tournier
B
B
Brillet
G
G
Silhol
F
F
Hanon
O
O
D000368:Aged; D000959:Antihypertensive Agents / Q000627:therapeutic use*; D005260:Female; D006306:Health Surveys; D006801:Humans; D006973:Hypertension / Q000188:drug therapy*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D015588:Observer Variation; D010349:Patient Compliance / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires
D000959:Antihypertensive Agents