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 While plenty of previous experiments have proven that daily
medications to treat hypertension, or high blood pressure, can help
minimize the risk of heart failure, less is known about real-world
outcomes for people who don’t always take their pills, the
researchers note in the journal Hypertension.
For the current study, researchers followed almost 4,000 patients
prescribed anti-hypertension pills in the Lombardy region of Italy
in 2005. Patients were monitored for an average of six and a half
years, unless they experienced heart failure, died or moved away
before the end of the study period.
Compared with people who rarely took their prescribed daily drugs,
patients who used the pills 26 percent to 50 percent of the time
were 17 percent less likely to be hospitalized for heart failure.
The risk was 34 percent lower for individuals who took their
medicine at least 75 percent of the time.
“As treating hypertension reduces the risk of heart failure, it is
logical to hypothesize that not taking prescribed drugs would be
associated with an increase in the risk of heart failure,” Dr.
Veronique Roger, a cardiovascular disease researcher at the Mayo
Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
“It is important to demonstrate it with ‘real life’ clinical
practice studies such as this one,” added Roger, who wasn’t involved
in the study. “These findings will help convey an important message
to patients about the importance of taking treatment as prescribed
to control hypertension.”
About one in three adults have high blood pressure, a condition that
contributes to more than nine million deaths each year, according to
the World Health Organization.
People often don’t know they have high blood pressure because they
don’t have symptoms. Even after they’re diagnosed, they sometimes
skip their medications because missing a dose doesn’t make them feel
sick.
In the current study, patients were typically around 67 years old,
and 54 percent were male.
Overall, 622 people were hospitalized for heart failure. The
researchers compared them to a randomly selected group of 3,110
similar individuals who weren’t hospitalized for the condition.
People hospitalized for heart failure generally took a wider variety
of anti-hypertension drugs, were more apt to have other medical
problems such as diabetes, and were more likely to get treatment
from multiple physicians.
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Overall, compliance with prescribed medicines wasn’t great for
either group. Among the people who avoided heart failure during the
study, only one-third took their prescribed drugs at least 75
percent of the time. Among the heart failure patients, just
one-quarter took their drugs this often.
The worst offenders in terms of skipping medication – people who
took their drugs no more than 25 percent of the time –accounted for
46 percent of heart failure patients and 41 percent of people who
didn’t get hospitalized for the condition.
One limitation of the study was that hospital records couldn’t be
reviewed to verify the heart failure admissions, said Giovanni
Corrao of the University of Milano-Bicocca and colleagues in their
report. They also relied on prescription data to estimate how often
participants took their pills.
There are many reasons patients don’t take their blood pressure
medication, noted Dr. Marie Teresa Brown, a researcher at Rush
Medical College in Chicago.
“Cost, access to health care, and simply forgetting have in the past
been thought by doctors to be the main reason for non-adherence,”
Brown, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email. “However,
most non-adherence is intentional – patients choose not to take
their medications.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1TYif7A Hypertension, published online July
27, 2015.
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