Anti osteoporotic treatment :Assessing the adherence to pharmacologic treatment in clinical practice

Osteoporosis causes over 8.9 million fractures annually.“Silent Diseases” like osteoporosis pose a challenge in terms of patient adherence to treatment regimen because the patients do not experience the benefit of symptom reduction. Personal assessment of the disease status drives the patient’s motivation for adherence to the medication regimen. Thus the adherence rates for asymptomatic disease treatments are typically low, being around 50% at end of 1 year.

Previous studies have claimed that adherence to prescribed treatment regimens in osteoporosis declined sharply after diagnosis with persistent falls over subsequent years.Good adherence has been defined as greater than 80% use of the prescribed medications.The beneficial effects of medication compliance can be observed with as little as 50% adherence and are even greater with at least 75-80% adherence

We wish to assess the rates of adherence of patients to the prescribed treatment regimens for anti-osteoporotic drugs and to identify and evaluate the reasons for the non-adherence to any treatment regimens.