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FRIDAY, April 19, 2019 (HealthDay News) – According to a new study, the closure of a neighborhood pharmacy could have serious consequences for heart patients living nearby.
According to a team at the University of Illinois at Chicago, patients may miss or stop taking the medications they need to stay healthy and safe.
"These results provide strong evidence that pharmacy closures contribute to [prescription] Non-adherence, including among the elderly insured, "said Dima Qato, head of the study, in a press release from a university.It is an badociate professor in systems, results and policies in Pharmacy subject at the College of Pharmacy of the University.
A cardiologist who did not participate in the new study said that many patients were not complying with the prescriptions they had been given.
"We do our best to educate and consolidate the drugs as much as possible, but in the end, it's up to the patient to get them and take them," said Dr. Satjit Bhusri, a cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. .
For example, "simply missing a dose of heart failure or hemocyte medication to treat an arrhythmia can have deadly consequences," Bhusri said. In fact, he said, non-compliance with the prescriptions "is the main cause of hospital readmission of heart patients".
So what role does the convenience of a local pharmacy play in all of this?
To find out, the Qato team badyzed data from over 3 million American adults, aged 50 and over, having completed at least one prescription of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs in a pharmacy. detail between 2011 and 2016.
Investigators compared compliance with the prescriptions of about 93,000 people who filled a prescription in a pharmacy that subsequently closed, along with those whose pharmacy had remained open.
Nearly 24% of patients whose pharmacies were closed failed to renew their statin prescription during the 12 months of follow-up, compared to almost 13% of those whose pharmacies remained open, according to the results.
There were significant decreases even in patients who had met all the prescriptions of their "fully adherent" statins the year before the closure of their pharmacy. Among fully adherent patients, 15% of those whose pharmacies have closed have stopped taking their statins, compared to 3.5% of those whose pharmacies have not closed.
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