A recent study on medication compliance shows that 40 percent of schizophrenia patients do not take their medication as prescribed. The study also showed that the severity of the illness and the patient’s attitude towards medication significantly affected their non-adherence.

“Lack of adherence to medication regimens is a critical issue in the treatment of schizophrenia and has serious impacts on the course of the illness, including worsening of symptoms, relapse, suicidal attempts, repeated emergency room visits or re-hospitalization, and poor functional outcomes,” says Seung-Hyun Kim, of the Korea University Research Institute of Mental Health in Seoul, Korea, and team. “The most common methods of assessing adherence are self-reports and physician reports. However, adherence to medication regimens in patients with schizophrenia may be overestimated by both patients and clinicians.”

An assessment on 51 schizophrenia patients was completed over an eight-week period on medication adherence. The investigation used four different methods of assessment, including pill counts, a self- reporting system, a clinical rating scale, and a Medication Event Monitoring System (MEMS), in which a microprocessor on medication bottles records the number of times the bottle is opened.

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