Are You Taking All Your Meds?

People in the Heart and Soul Study – who had established coronary heart disease – were asked by their Californian physicians the following question: “In the past month, how often did you take your medications as the doctor prescribed?” The results of this query were recently published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The replies from over 1000 outpatients showed that 8.2% were nonadherent, i.e. they failed to take their meds as prescribed 75% of the time.

During the 4-year follow-up period there were 146 “cardiovascular events” – cardiac death, non-fatal heart attack, or stroke. The non-adherent participants were more than twice as likely to have such an event than those taking their medications regularly.

An earlier study reported in the same journal reported that failure to take medications after a heart attack tripled the likelihood of death in the following year. So this is not a startlingly new finding. But it’s one that’s worthy of repeating, until everyone has got the message.