A Community Pharmacist-led Intervention to Improve Adherence to Lipid-lowering Treatment

Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences

Status: Completed

Conditions: Hypercholesterolemia

Treatments: Device: Compliance Card; Behavioral: advanced adherence counseling+reminder

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT00493337

NL18496.041.07

Details and patient eligibility

About

The objective of the study is to test the effectiveness of a community pharmacist-led intervention to increase adherence to lipid lowering treatment.

Full description

Medication non-adherence represents an important threat to the health of the Western people. A large number of pharmacy records based studies demonstrated that adherence to lipid lowering treatment in daily practice is substantially worse compared to adherence observed in the controlled setting of randomized controlled trials. In addition, the relationship between non-adherence with statin-treatment assessed with pharmacy records and cardiovascular outcomes has been convincingly demonstrated. This implies that pharmacy records can and should be used to identify non-adherent patients and thus patients at risk for major cardiovascular events. Using this data, community pharmacists can play a more substantive role in developing the concept of pharmaceutical care. The objective of the study is to test the effectiveness of a community pharmacist-led intervention to increase adherence to lipid lowering treatment.

Enrollment: 373 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 65 to 90 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Suboptimal adherent to statin treatment
• Older than 65 years
• Responsible for own medication intake

Exclusion criteria

• Life expectancy shorter than 6 months
• Institutionalized
• User of medication blisters

Trial design

373 participants in 3 patient groups

Control group

No Intervention group

Advanced counseling

Experimental group

Treatment:

Behavioral: advanced adherence counseling+reminder

Compliance Card only

Active Comparator group

Treatment:

Device: Compliance Card