Compliance with drug therapy—new answers to an old question

Abstract

Compliance with medical recommendations, especially with drug therapy, has been recognized to represent a complex challenge since its first mentioning by Hippocrates about 2400 years ago [1]. An in‐depth scientific approach towards this problem, however, can only be traced over the past three decades with a strong increase in published studies over this period of time (Figure 1). As is generally true in medicine and other scientific subjects, the availability of reliable methods is of crucial importance for scientific progress. Thus, the development of electronic medication event monitoring systems (MEMS) in 1977 has provided the basis for a rapid expansion in understanding the compliance issue [2]. To date, this method represents the ‘gold standard’ for measuring compliance and its application in many areas of drug research and in clinical practice is rapidly expanding [3,4]. In the following, we will briefly review some of the recent advances in the understanding of medication compliance and will attempt to layout some of the resulting lessons for pharmacotherapy.