Understanding and enhancing adherence in adults with diabetes.

This article reviews selected recent literature on adult diabetes patient-centered adherence to diabetes care recommendations. We describe more fully a limited number of articles that have particular lessons for diabetes clinicians and researchers. Each article was reviewed for methodology, adherence measures, and types of outcome data collected. This process produced a few studies evaluating an intervention to promote adherence, subsequent targeted behavior changes, as well as health outcomes. Using a standard measure of diabetes self-care adherence over multiple studies may be an important way to compare results across diverse interventions. Advances in research designs and measures show promising results for understanding and enhancing adherence in adults coping with diabetes. Much more behavioral research in diabetes is needed in order to significantly improve the health and quality of life in this population.