A Systematic Review of Factors Influencing Medication Adherence in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Patients

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Medication adherence is an import- ant factor in controlling Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM). There is a lack of consensus on which factors influencing medication adherence and which technique was widely used in assessing medication adherence.

METHODS A rigorous systematic search conducted to identify robustly implicated factors, found that all were observational studies that studied factors influencing medication adherence. The search was narrowed to 16 observational studies (total N= 6419) relating to medi- cation adherence and T2DM, medication adherence as- sessments and medication adherence rate. Five domain of factors influencing medication adherence were identi- fied. These were patient-related factors, socio-economic factors, condition-related factors, health-system/health- care related factors and therapy-related factors. The as- sessment used for medication adherence were all indirect methods, either pill count, dosage method or question- naire.

RESULTS Good medication adherence rate ranged from 35.4% to 83.3%.

CONCLUSION This review showed that poor medica- tion adherence was likely associated with young age, low income, poor diabetic knowledge, multiple anti-diabetic treatments used, health service dissatisfaction and poor glycemic control. It also revealed that the older the pa- tient the better adherence to medication, and also good glycemic control.