The role of media on statin adherence

Abstract

Fig. 1. Percentage of days covered by statin from 2011 to 2013. Statins have been reported to reduce the incidence of cardiovascular events after coronary stenting and current guidelines recommend the routine use of statins in this population. But, about half of patients discontinue statin therapy within the first year, and adherence decreases during follow-up period [1,2]. Medication adherence is a complex problem that is affected by many factors, including perceptions and understanding of the disease burden. Specific factors identified include low socioeconomic status, high medication costs, lack of transportation and poor understanding of medication instructions [3]. In addition, media coverage of health facts may also have an impact on beliefs, and behaviors related to health. Niederdeppe et al. [4] reported that exposure to statin advertisements increased the diagnosis of hypercholesterolemia and use of statins. However in recent years, statins were frequently criticized in Turkish media and most of them were also presented in a negative fashion in globalmedia. Our goalwas to analyze the effects of media on statin adherence. We retrospectively analyzed the statin adherence of 908 percutaneous coronary intervention patients whom were prescribed a statin before 2011 at our institute and had continuous insurance coverage to determine statin adherence. We used the pharmacy-based proportion of days covered (PDC)method to quantify statin adherence. To quantify the effects of media, we made a search on Google. We searched the word “cholesterol drugs” on Turkish pages from “news” section for 2011 to 2014 individually.