Adhering to blood pressure medications reduces the risk of stroke and heart attack. Researchers from the University of Oxford emphasized in a new study that forgetting to regularly take blood pressure medications not only reduces their effectiveness but also increases the likelihood of stroke and heart attack.
Study Results and the Importance of Adherence
"Qianqian Yang," a PhD student at the University of Oxford, stated: "Our results reinforce the notion that medications are not effective in patients who do not take them regularly." Yang added that patients with lower adherence to medications had poorer cardiovascular outcomes. In contrast, patients who adhered to their medications experienced greater reductions in blood pressure and, as a result, were better protected from cardiovascular events.
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Worrying Statistics
Researchers noted in the background notes that approximately 1.4 billion adults aged 30 to 79 worldwide suffer from high blood pressure. For this study, researchers collected data from 9 previous trials of blood pressure medications involving over 91,000 participants. The team categorized participants based on their adherence to prescribed medications. In this context, those who took their medications 80% of the time were classified as having "low adherence" to their prescriptions.
Results showed that about 88% of individuals adhered to their prescriptions in the first year, while this figure dropped to 79% by the fifth year. Yang noted that the decline in adherence over time was evident even in the structured conditions of the trials.
Consequences of Non-Adherence
In patients with high adherence to medications, systolic blood pressure decreased by 5.2 units between the treatment group and the comparison group. In contrast, this reduction among individuals with low adherence was only 3 units. Researchers reported that individuals who adhered to their blood pressure medications were 11% less likely to experience a stroke, heart attack, heart disease, or heart failure.
Yang stated: "We have evidence that poor adherence to antihypertensive medications is associated with worse outcomes." According to researchers, the results of this study indicate that doctors should emphasize the importance of adherence to medical prescriptions when managing high blood pressure.
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