Medication adherence in multiple sclerosis as a potential model for other chronic diseases: a population-based cohort study

Objective To determine whether better medication adherence in multiple sclerosis (MS) might be due to specialised disease-modifying drug (DMD) support programmes by: (1) establishing higher adherence in MS than in other chronic diseases and (2) determining if higher adherence is associated with patient-specific or treatment-specific factors. Design Retrospective cohort study with data from 1 January 1996 to 31 December 2015. Setting Population-based health administrative data from three Canadian provinces. Participants Individual cohorts were created using validated case definitions for MS, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease (PD) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Subjects were included if they received >= 1 dispensation for a disease-related drug between 1 January 1997 and 31 December 2014. Main outcome measure(s) Proportion of subjects with optimal adherence (>= 80%) measured by the medication possession ratio 1 year after the index date (first dispensation of disease-related drug). Results 126 478 subjects were included in the primary analysis (MS, n=6271; epilepsy, n=55 739; PD, n=21 304; RA, n=43 164). Subjects with epilepsy (adjusted OR, aOR 0.29; 95% CI 0.19 to 0.45), PD (aOR 0.42; 95% CI 0.29 to 0.63) or RA (aOR 0.26; 95% CI 0.19 to 0.35) were less likely to have optimal 1-year adherence compared with subjects with MS. Within the MS cohort, adherence was higher for DMD than for chronic-use non-MS medications, and no consistent patient-related predictors of adherence were observed across all four non-MS medication classes, including having optimal adherence to DMD. Conclusions Subjects with MS were significantly more likely to have optimal 1-year adherence than subjects with epilepsy, RA and PD, and optimal adherence appears related to treatment-specific factors rather than patient-related factors. This supports the hypothesis that higher adherence to the MS DMDs could be due to the specialised support programmes; these programmes may serve as a model for use in other chronic conditions.

Automated summary

The study found that patients with multiple sclerosis had significantly better medication adherence compared to patients with epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, and rheumatoid arthritis, which may be due to treatment-specific factors rather than patient-related factors.