About a third of all acne patients do not take all of the medicine that is prescribed to them.
A survey taken of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center patients revealed a low medication adherence rate among acne patients.
A team of researchers looked at 143 patients, and found 27 percent failed to obtain all of the medications prescribed to them. The more medications a patient was prescribed the less likely they were to take all of them. The patients gave explanations for not filling their prescriptions such as "cost, forgetfulness, having similar medication on hand, not agreeing with the prescribed treatment and improvement of the skin condition," the researchers reported.
"Non-adherence is a pervasive problem in all of medicine, particularly when treating chronic conditions such as acne," said Steven R. Feldman, professor of dermatology at Wake Forest Baptist and lead author of the study. "A previous study reported a 10 percent primary non-adherence rate for acne patients, so we were surprised that what we found was more than twice that."
The findings also showed prescriptions for topical medications were less likely to be filled than those for oral medications and paper prescriptions were less likely to be filled than electronic ones. The researchers noted that these findings were not statistically significant.
"The study showed that patients are more inclined to follow the treatment regimen when only one medication is prescribed," Feldman said. "Multiple agents are typically required to address the multiple factors that cause acne, but simplifying treatment regimens by prescribing products that contain two or more active ingredients could prove effective in reducing non-adherence."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal JAMA Dermatology.
