Study on Factors that Contribute to Poor Patient Compliance with Medication in Japan

Abstract

Patient compliance is an important part of drug therapy, but not all patients take their medication exactly as directed. Although it is very important to investigate and identify factors that contribute to poor compliance, there have so far been very few studies of this kind in Japan. We therefore performed a cross-sectional study to analyze the factors associated with poor patient compliance (various patient background factors and a dozen matters dealing with medical care: the relationship between physicians and hospital staff, the time required to visit hospital, the drug therapy regimen, etc.) using the data obtained from patients who had been subjects of a QOL study on Carvedilol.The results showed that patient compliance was “good” is 83.3% of the patients, and that compliance was poorer among the following three groups of patients: employed patients (odds ratio: 5.15, 95% confidence level: 1.53-17.30, p=0.01), female patients (odds ratio: 3.39, 95% confidence level: 1.07-10.74, p=0.038), and patients who felt that their attending physicians did not provide enough information about the administered drug (odds ratio: 2.58, 95% confidence level: 0.88-7.58, p=0.084).