Grant: Project Grant

Only one in every two people with a chronic illness takes their medication as it was intended. This is referred to as medication adherence. People with poor medication adherence often have more health problems. They are also more likely to be hospitalized and are more likely to die. Poor medication adherence is very costly, and is estimated to cost the Canadian health care system $8-10 billion every year. Recently, we looked at information about everyone with multiple sclerosis (MS) from 3 Canadian provinces. We found that adherence to the disease-modifying therapies (DMT) for MS was much higher than what has been reported for other chronic diseases. We think this might be because of the training and support programs provided to individuals receiving DMT. If this is true, we believe MS will provide an excellent model for improving medication adherence in other diseases. However, the only studies available to compare our results to came from very specific groups, included few people, or used varying definitions for adherence. These factors can affect adherence results, so we want to test our theory by comparing our results to the adherence levels we calculate for several other diseases. We will do this the same way as we did for MS. We will also look at adherence to non-DMT medications in our MS group. This will further test our theory that the high levels of adherence are related specifically to the support programs offered with DMTs. There are no support programs for other medications in MS. This study is important for several reasons. First, it will give information about adherence for several common chronic diseases. This information is not known at the population-level, but is important to clinicians and policymakers. Second, the results will identify a possible model or intervention to improve adherence that may be applied to other diseases. Identifying ways to improve adherence will provide significant benefits to patients, and to the healthcare system.