Research 'challenges assumption that arthritis patients take their medication regularly'

New UK research has challenged the assumption that people with rheumatoid arthritis always take their medication as prescribed.

Researchers from the Arthritis Research UK Centre for Epidemiology at The University of Manchester found that 40% of patients scored low on an adherence questionnaire at least once during their time in a recent study, indicating that they might not be taking their expensive biological therapies as regularly as prescribed.

Their research is published online in the journal Rheumatology.

The findings have prompted Arthritis Research UK's head of health promotion to encourage people with arthritis to seek out further information and advice so that they are able to better understand the medication they have been prescribed, its positive benefits for their condition and the reasons for taking it as directed.

Belinda Wadsworth said: "Healthcare professionals and other information providers need to find more effective ways to inform their patients about the importance of taking drugs as prescribed for them. People with rheumatoid arthritis need to feel empowered to keep their condition under control by having a better understanding of why their medication is less effective if they don't take it as directed."

The research team found potential reasons to explain patients' behaviour. For example, patients with a positive belief in the need for the drug were more likely to take their medication as were those with fewer concerns about potential side effects. Other important factors included how patients viewed their illness. For example, patients who appreciated the chronic nature of rheumatoid arthritis, those with a better understanding of their disease and those who felt they had high levels of professional or family support were also most likely to take their drugs as prescribed.

What Causes Rheumatoid Arthritis?

Doctors don't know the exact cause of rheumatoid arthritis. They know that with this arthritis, a person's immune system attacks his or her own body tissues. Researchers are learning many things about why and how this happens. Things that may cause rheumatoid arthritis are:

Genes (passed from parent to child)
Environment
Hormones.

Senior author and director of the NIHR Manchester Musculoskeletal Biomedical Research Unit, Professor Ian Bruce said: "This is one of the first studies to assess biological adherence in rheumatoid arthritis patients over time. In the era of new and effective high-cost drugs there is the assumption that people with rheumatoid arthritis regularly take their medication as prescribed, but our findings challenge this assumption.

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