Prevalence of Nonadherence to Antihypertensive Medications among Adults Attending Primary Healthcare Clinics in Al-Hasa Region: A Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

To assess the prevalence of nonadherence to antihypertensive medications among adults attending Primary Healthcare Clinics (PHCs) in Al-Hasa Region. This cross-sectional study included participants from a variety of clinics in the region and each of them had been interviewed to complete the questionnaire. The participants were selected by random sampling from eight different PHCs. Data were collected by a structured questionnaire that was adopted from two different scales to determine the association between adherence and socioeconomic and health status characteristics. We included 372 participants with a mean (±standard deviation) age of 53 ± 12.4 years and most of them were male (62%, n = 231). The overall mean adherence based on our adapted scale was 5.3 ± 2.3. Among participants taking more than six medications, the percentage of nonadherent participants was significantly higher than the percentage of adherent participants (85% vs. 15%, p = 0.016). Participants with single comorbidity were more likely to be adherent than patients with multiple comorbidities (odds ratio = 1.52, p = 0.049). In conclusion, we found a high prevalence of nonadherence to antihypertensive medications in the Al-Hasa community and the main association factor was found to be the presence of comorbidity. Such high rate sends alarming messages for the need of potential interventions to improve adherence outcome.

Keywords

• Antihypertensive drugs
• hypertension
• nonadherence
• prevalence