How are BP and Cholesterol drugs usually prescribed?

[ADN1226]

Hi,

Can you help me with a project i'm working on?

Its a stats project and I want to sample patients that are on a medication where I can assess their medication adherence using some kind of test. such as hypertension meds and checking their bp or patients on cholesterol meds and checking their lipid panel. My target is also with the low literacy population so I want to use medications that are harder to comprehend than a once a day drug.

So! Can you tell me generally which meds for hypertension and cholesterol that are NOT once a day, if any?

And if not, can you think of other conditions that have drugs that are not once a day and can assess its effectiveness by some test? I was looking at pain but so many drugs are PRN and the pain index is very subjective.

Thanks so much!

-ADN

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[Vitamin K]

Hi,

So! Can you tell me generally which meds for hypertension and cholesterol that are NOT once a day, if any?

And if not, can you think of other conditions that have drugs that are not once a day and can assess its effectiveness by some test? I was looking at pain but so many drugs are PRN and the pain index is very subjective.

Thanks so much!

-ADN

Wow. There's no way you're going to be able to evaluate every drug for hypertension/cholesterol/etc that isn't once daily. There are a LOT of drugs that aren't once daily, and some that can be once daily but don't necessarily have to be once daily. Want to try narrowing your topic a little?

 

[ADN1226]

Oh really? I thought most hypertension drugs like diuretics and ACE inhibitors were taken once daily... as well as statins are commonly prescribed once a day.

I just wanted to know if there are any drugs used for hypertension or cholesterol that you usually see in the pharmacy that are commonly written for anything but once daily.

 

[xiphoid2010]

Oh really? I thought most hypertension drugs like diuretics and ACE inhibitors were taken once daily... as well as statins are commonly prescribed once a day.

I just wanted to know if there are any drugs used for hypertension or cholesterol that you usually see in the pharmacy that are commonly written for anything but once daily.

like captopril, metoprolol tartrate?

 

[xiphoid2010]

for dyslipidemia, gemfibrozil and cholestyramine comes to mind.

 

[ADN1226]

Thats really helpful, thank you!

 

[Pharmavixen]

Another way of measuring adherence is through a pill count, where you get the patients to bring their bottles in and you see if there's the number of pills there should be.

 

[codep1nk]

Another way of measuring adherence is through a pill count, where you get the patients to bring their bottles in and you see if there's the number of pills there should be.

I agree.

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It may be difficult to measure adherence the way you are planning. It would be hard to standardize patients when using different classes of drugs since their outcomes would vary.

Especially with hypertension and dyslipidemia...there is always a reason for adding/using a different class of drug whether it be comorbidity/allergy/lack of control. If you're adding a beta blocker to the standard hctz...there's something else going on...same if patient is using gebfib over a statin. The patients are different so it may be difficult to measure adherence through BP or lipid levels.

Good luck.

 

[ADN1226]

I don't know why I didn't think about counting the pills... great idea!

Yes, I agree. I think its difficult to measure adherence and there are limitations to doing it my way but I think thats the closest we can get. Of course there will be other confounding factors but we'll just have to consider it a weakness to the experiment. This is just a theoretical project so its not going to be administered. But thanks so much for the comments, they've been very helpful.

If you're interested heres more info about the project. I'm testing 2 types of counseling techniques to see if it'll help low literacy patients adhere to their medication more... because they can comprehend the instructions by using pictorials (similar to a calendar and auxillary labels) to explain the directions vs. only traditional counseling.