SPIRITUALITY AND MEDICATION ADHERENCE AMONG HYPERTENSIVES ATTENDING THE FAMILY MEDICINE CLINIC OF A NIGERIAN TERTIARY INSTITUTION: ANY MEETING POINT?

Background: Adherence to medications in chronic medical conditions such as systemic hypertension has been a major challenge globally. A number of factors responsible for this have been documented, but there are only few researches that explore the role spirituality can play in medication adherence.

Objective: To determine the relationship between spirituality and medication adherence in patients with hypertension.

Method: This was a hospital-based cross-sectional study. Data collection was done using interviewer-administered questionnaires. Patients' spirituality levels and medication adherence were assessed using validated questionnaires. The relationship between participants' medication adherence and related variables was obtained while logistic regression was used to determine the independent predictors of poor medication adherence of respondents.

Results: A total of 376 patients were interviewed with 62.8% being female. Two-thirds of the participants (65.7%) had low medication adherence while the remaining one-third (34.3%) had high medication adherence. More than half of the participants (61.2%) had low levels of spirituality, 123 of them (32.7%) had moderate levels of spirituality while just 6.1% had high spirituality levels. The higher the level of spirituality, the lower the medication adherence (p=0.001).

Conclusion: There is both poor medication adherence and low level of spirituality among the respondents. Spirituality was found to have an inverse relationship with medication adherence.