The Impact of Medications on Daily Lives of Patients with Cardiovascular Diseases: A Cross Sectional Study
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Date
2021-08-01
Authors
ترهي, رشا يوسف
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Publisher
An-Najah National University
Abstract
Background: Multiple long-term cardiovascular medication use affects different aspects of patients’ daily lives and quality of life, which creates a burden for patients. The burden of medications critically affects their medication beliefs, behaviours, and disease outcomes. Evaluating medicines’ burden from the patients’ perspectives is a crucial endeavour to identify barriers that may hinder achieving optimal health outcomes. The present study aimed to exploit the Arabic version of Living with Medicines Questionnaire-3 (LMQ-3) to quantify the medicine burden among cardiovascular patients, assess the effect of chronic cardiovascular medication use on different aspects of patients’ daily lives, and to examine the relationship between demographic and clinical characteristics of the patients’ daily life score.
Methods: The study was a cross-sectional observational study; patients were included from community pharmacies who used cardiovascular medication in Jerusalem, Palestine, from January to October 2019. The data collection form consisted of demographic and clinical information about the patients, Living with Medicines Questionnaire version-3 (LMQ-3), which measures the impact of medicine use on patients’ daily lives and a visual analogue scale (VAS), allowed the patient to express his or her overall perceived medication burden which is a scale from 1–10 that measures global burden, with anchors indicating no burden at all to extremely burdensome.
Results: A total of 380 patients were included in this study. Their mean age (±SD) was 58±12.2 years, the majority of patients have health insurance (292, (76.8%)), 227 (59.7%) were living in urban areas, and 259 (68.2%) patients had hypertension. According to our present research, the LMQ domain score revealed a significant burden among the female gender, living in urban areas in comparison to rural or camps, without insurance, with one or two diseases, using 1–4 medicines, using solid oral dose with other non-oral formulations for some domains in which level of significance was determined at P < 0.05. The vast majority (96.3%) of respondents self-reported suffering from a minimum (39.2%) to moderate (57.1%) degree of burden. The median (IQR) LMQ overall score was 108 (19.8), which is considered a moderate burden. Furthermore, the present research indicated that the evaluation mean ± SD of the global burden by the VAS score was 5.2 ± 2.3, which indicates medium burden.
Conclusion: Healthcare providers should acknowledge the impact of multiple long-term medicines on patients’ daily lives and make an effort to diminish patients’ medication-related burden by using LMQ- 3 personally to provide individual tailored therapeutic care plans to achieve the best possible benefits for patients. Additionally, expanding pharmacists’ roles, especially clinical pharmacists, can assist doctors in estimating a patient’s medication related burden through the implementation of pharmaceutical care.