Adherence evaluation of endocrine treatment in breast cancer: methodological aspects

BMC Cancer

Research Article

Christian Marth¹  Michael Hubalek¹  Eva Gamper²  Georg Kemmler²  Bernhard Holzner²  Johannes Giesinger²  Monika Sztankay²  Anne S Oberguggenberger²  Verena Meraner²  Barbara Sperner-Unterweger²  Beate Beer³  Herbert Oberacher³  Birthe Schubert³ 

[1] Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Innsbruck Medical University, Anichstraße 35, 6020, Innsbruck, Austria;Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Innsbruck Medical University, Anichstraße 35, 6020, Innsbruck, Austria;Institute of Legal Medicine, Innsbruck Medical University, Anichstraße 35, 6020, Innsbruck, Austria;

关键词: Breast neoplasm;    Endocrine therapy;    Patient compliance;    Method;    Adherence;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2407-12-474

 received in 2012-06-13, accepted in 2012-09-25,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundCurrent studies on adherence to endocrine therapy in breast cancer patients suffer from methodological limitations due to a lack of well-validated methods for assessing adherence. There is no gold standard for measuring adherence. The aim of our study was to compare four different approaches for evaluating adherence to anastrozole therapy for breast cancer with regard to concordance between methods.MethodsOutpatients with early breast cancer treated with anastrozole completed the multi-method assessment of adherence. We implemented a self-report scale (the Simplified Medication Adherence Questionnaire), physician- ratings, refill records and determination of anastrozole serum concentration.ResultsComparison of the four approaches using Spearman rank correlation revealed poor concordance across all methods reflecting weak correlations of 0.2-0.4. Considering this data incomparability across methods, we still observed high adherence rates of 78%-98% across measures.ConclusionOur findings contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the impact that methodological aspects exert on the results of adherence measurement in breast cancer patients receiving endocrine treatment. Our findings suggest that the development and validation of instruments specific to patients receiving endocrine agents is imperative in order to arrive at a more accurate assessment and to subsequently obtain more precise estimates of adherence rates in this patient population.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Oberguggenberger et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.