Category: Rating Scales
Objective: To understand how patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and their care partners describe medication adherence.
Background: Medication adherence in is a complex construct, associated with reduced quality of life and increased healthcare costs. The vocabulary used by people involved in medication adherence in PD varies and may be poorly understood if the meanings of the phenomena expressed by the individuals are not conceptualized according to the specific context of PD.
Method: We conduct an exploratory qualitative, international, and multicenter study using focus group approach in two international outpatient clinics specialized in movement disorders in Brazil (BRA) and United States (USA). Twelve care partners of people with PD (7 from BRA and 5 from USA), and 7 patients with PD from BRA participated in 3 independent focus groups. Participants’ speeches were recorded, manually transcribed, translated from Portuguese to English, reviewed and analyzed to develop a detailed list of phenomena which were categorized into domains using Bardin’s content analysis (1).
Results: Medication adherence in PD was subdivided into 14 domains originating from 232 phenomena, 117 (49.8%) from patients and 115 (48.9%) from their care partners (Table 1). All individuals experienced more than one domain of medication adherence, although the patients did not mention phenomena related to the “Level of functional independence” and “Personal characteristics” domains. The most common phenomena were “Positive therapeutic behaviors (14.9%)”, “Complex therapeutic regimen (14.5%)”, “Barriers to treatment access (11.5%)” and “Perception of the effect of the drug (9.4%)”.
Conclusion: Medication adherence in PD is multidimensional, and awareness of the multiple phenomena perceived and described by patients and their care partners may be useful to the development of future clinical and research instruments that capture the experience of medication adherence more comprehensively in this population.
References: Bardin L. Content Analysis. São Paulo: Edições 70; 2011. 279 p.
To cite this abstract in AMA style:
M. Tosin, C. Goetz, D. Hall, G. Stebbins, B. Oliveira. Understanding patient perceptions of the key components of Medication Adherence in PD: a multicenter, international study [abstract]. Mov Disord. 2022; 37 (suppl 2). https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/understanding-patient-perceptions-of-the-key-components-of-medication-adherence-in-pd-a-multicenter-international-study/. Accessed May 15, 2025.« Back to 2022 International Congress
MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/understanding-patient-perceptions-of-the-key-components-of-medication-adherence-in-pd-a-multicenter-international-study/