[The influence of socio-economic factors on the compliance of patients with treatment of hypertonic disease].

The authors analyzed 307 questionnaires of patients with essential hypertension (EH) in order to study the influence of social and economic factors on compliance to outpatient therapy. The analysis shows that about 55% of patients take antihypertensive medication on a regular basis. The most frequent reasons for non-compliance to treatment are financial problems, personal features such as forgetfulness and absent-mindedness, lack of motivation towards treatment, the necessity to take a large number of drugs, not knowing about the necessity to take medicines on a regular basis, fear of complications of the therapy etc. There is a strong positive correlation between patients" compliance, on the one hand, and the length of the disease and the level of education, on the other. The was a negative correlation between compliance, on the one hand, and the number of medicines taken, the financial income, the cost of antihypertensive medication, and the number of visits to the doctor during the year. Measures to increase the compliance of patients with EH to treatment include improvement of education of doctors on pharmacoeconomic issues, a wider use of educational actions for patients, improvement of the quality of outpatient observation and the work of schools for patients with arterial hypertension, as well as introduction of preferential provision with pharmaceuticals for all patients with arterial hypertension.