Adherence to medication in elderly: A university hospital-based and descriptive study

The aim of this study is to determine the medication adherence and affecting factors in elderly patients age 65 and older. A descriptive study was conducted with 396 elderly patients applied to some clinics of a university hospital. In the study irregular drug use (defined as; skipping the dosage of the drugs used daily more than once in a week with any reason) and polypharmacy (five or more drug use) were analyze. 52.5% (208) of the participants was woman and the mean age was 70.1±5.1. 94.9% of the participants had at least one chronic disease and mean number of having chronic disease was 2.7±1.3. 94.2% of the participants use drug continuously and mean number of drug use was 3.7±2.2 (in women 4.0, in men 3.5). Women use drug more irregularly than men. 28.7% of the participants used five or more drugs. Medication adherence was 71.3%. There's no relation between medication adherence and polypharmacy. Chronic obstructive lung disease-Asthma drugs (62.5%), gastrointestinal system drugs (63.2%) and central nervous system drugs (54.8%) were the medications with lowest adherence at both sex. The most important factor that affected medical adherence was ‘‘to forget to take the pills''. It was found that drug usage was very high and as the number of the drug increased, medication adherence was decreased. It's important that the number of prescribed drugs must be minimum, in order to organize drug usage in elderly people. It is thought that prescribing less drugs and preventing unnecessary drug use would increase medication adherence.