Daily regimen and compliance with treatment

doi:10.1136/bmj.324.7334.425

BMJ 2002;324:425 ( 16 February )

Letters

Daily regimen and compliance with treatment

All available evidence needs to be evaluated

Concordance respects beliefs and wishes of patients

Literature before 1980 should not have been ignored

All available evidence needs to be evaluated

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ Bloom's editorial is a surprising contribution to the important discussion about how best to improve compliance withtreatment in chronic diseases.¹ His assertion that fewer dailydoses increase compliance, and his notion that the least expensivedrugs are usually the least effective and have the highest rateof side effects, cannot gounchallenged.

Bloom cites one of his own studies, funded by a pharmaceutical company, to support the idea that fewer daily doses improvecompliance.² This study was a retrospective analysis of prescriptionrecords, which showed higher rates of prescription refill at oneyear among those treated with once daily versus more frequentdosing and those treated with newer, more expensive drugs. Thestudy was confined to supposedly hypertensive patients youngerthan 71, but no initial blood pressure values were available,and none of them was evaluated in a standardised manner. Moreover,no blood pressure values, non-pharmacological interventions used,. . . [Full text of this article]