Patients Most Desire High Medication Efficacy, Decision-Making Ability, Authors Find
Patients’ most desired trait for their psychiatric medication was high efficacy, according to findings published in a poster at the 2023 American Psychiatric Association annual meeting taking place this week in San Francisco, CA.
“Providing personalized medicine considering a patient's preference and expectations for the drug may contribute to improvement of drug compliance and lead to better treatment outcomes,” researchers noted in the presentation.
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Researchers conducted a survey of 707 outpatients with major psychiatric disorders who visited hospitals in South Korea between 2016 and 2018. Of the participants, 206 had psychotic disorders (29.1%), 137 had bipolar disorders (19.4%), and 364 had depressive disorders (51.5%). Participants were asked to give their demographic information and answer questions on their wishes for medication, key medical decision-making, and preferred drug types. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) test was used to compare the differences between disease groups.
Patients were found to desire high efficacy most in medication (44.01 ± 21.44%) as well as having themselves (37.39 ± 22.57%) and a doctor (35.27 ± 22.88%) as their main medical decision-makers. Tablet or capsule form was the preferred drug form (36.16 ± 30.69%) indicated by participants. Patients in the depressive group had a lower preference ratio for high efficacy than the other groups (38.81 ± 18.39%), and preference ratio for a doctor as the key decision maker was higher in the bipolar group (41.61 ± 26.64) than the other disorder groups (psychotic group: 32.47±26.08, depressive group: 34.42±18.68). In the preferred drug type category, the psychotic disorders group (27.27 + 29.40) had a higher preference rate for extended-release drugs than the bipolar group (20.82 ± 19.27) and the depressive group (19.30 ± 15.68).
