An-Najah Staff

Objective: The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between antihypertensive medication adherence and HRQoL. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted, adopting the Morisky eight-item Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS) for the assessment of medication adherence and using the European Quality of Life scale (EQ-5D-5L) for the assessment of HRQoL. Descriptive and comparative statistics were used to describe socio-demographic and disease-related characteristics of the patients. All analyses were performed using SPSS v 15.0.
Results: Four hundred and ten hypertensive patients were enrolled in the study. The mean age of participants was 58.38 ± 10.65 years; 52% were female and 36.8% had low antihypertensive medication adherence. Patients with a high adherence rate had the highest HRQoL scores compared with those with a low or medium adherence rate (Kruskal–Wallis test; p < 0.05). After adjustment for covariates using multiple regression, HRQoL was still statistically significantly associated with medication adherence (p = 0.001). Conclusions: Low HRQoL may be an important barrier to achieving high rates of adherence to treatment. These study findings could be helpful in clinical practice, mainly in the early treatment of hypertensive patients, at a point where improving HRQoL is still possible.