Evaluation of medication adherence towards oral anti diabetic drugs and insulin combination among patients with type 2 diabetes

The prevalence of diabetes mellitus in Malaysia is high with 15.2% reported in 2011. Anti-diabetic drugs are known to effectively control type 2 diabetes mellitus. However previous studies showed that glycaemic control is still far from satisfactory in Malaysia. It has been widely established that adherence to anti diabetic agents is positively associated with a decrease in HbA1c reading. This study aimed to evaluate medication adherence towards anti diabetic medications and its relationship with demographic data as well as clinical data among type 2 diabetes patients. This is a cross sectional study conducted in medical ward of Hospital Sungai Buloh and involved 200 patients with type 2 diabetes. Borang Soal-Selidik was used to collect data includes patient's demographic and medical backgrounds while Morisky-8 was used to assess adherence. SPSS program version 20 and Microsoft Excel version 2010 were used for analysis. Main outcome was levels of medication adherence. The relationship between variables and adherence was determined. According to Morisky-8, 121 patients (60.5%) had low adherence, 73 (36.5%) had medium adherence and only 6 (3.0%) had high adherence. Adherence score was positively and significantly associated with clinical data including duration of diabetes, HbA 1 c reading, number of medications and presence of co-morbidity. Adherence was not significantly associated with demographic data includes gender, age and race. Conclusions : Effective strategies that enhance better medication adherence among diabetic patients should be adopted. The example of practices and services which can improve patients' adherence are campaigns, medication counselling and medication therapy adherence clinic. This can subsequently improve patients' health and quality of life and further reduce health care costs.