Advances in Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety

Abstrait

Medication Adherence and Compliance: Uncontrolled Variables in Psychiatric Clinical Drug Trials

Linka Griswold, Joan Murray, Philip Corrado

Over the past decade, there have been thousands of controlled clinical trials assessing the efficacy and safety of drugs used to treat a range of illnesses. The purpose of this review is to document how often medication adherence is controlled in pharmaceutical drug research. Authors of this study focused specifically on psychiatric drugs and clinical drug trials between the years 2002 and 2012. The automated searches included the use of search engines designed to scan documents for key words; limiters were set to narrow the search queries to human subjects, clinical drug trials, and publications within the past 10 years (2002 to 2012). Databases reviewed included: PubMed / Medline, Science Direct, Scirus, and Scopus. The variable, control for adherence, occurred in a low frequency among articles published, and statistical significance was found between drug classes as well as queried search phrases that examined adherence versus compliance. Overall, mention of control for adherence or compliance is missing in a significant and large portion of published articles involving clinical drug trials. The results revealed that the majority of articles written, across all four databases and all seven drug categories, did not control for medication adherence and compliance. At the conservative end, results show that approximately 67% of articles on clinical drug trials neglected to mention or control for compliance. Results call into question the validity of clinical drug trial claims, as well as the safety and efficacy of pharmaceuticals in psychiatric practice.