Health Literacy and Relation to Adherence to Pharmacologic Treatment of Patients in Hemodialysis

Abstract

Objective: to analyze the relationship between health literacy and adherence to treatment of dialysis patients. Method: cross-sectional study with 424 end-stage renal disease patients on conventional HD in the West and Middle West of Santa Catarina. The SALPHA questionnaire was used to analyze health literacy and the Brief Medication Questionnaire was used for treatment adherence. Minimental was used to analyze cognition. Results: the mean age was 57.3±15.8 years, 53.3% men, 71.4% with low education level, 10.1% have had a kidney transplant, 5.0% reported having already taken an extra dose of medication, 4.0% said they had missed doses and 22.6% admitted failure of days or prescribed doses. Literacy was inadequate for 67%, 49.1% were considered to have cognitive impairment, 55.2% are adhered to treatment. Low adherence to treatment was related to inadequate literacy (p<0.01), literacy and cognition showed a positive correlation (r=0.5; p<0.00), those who reported taking extra dose of the medication were less adherent (p<0.03), as well as those who omitted medication at some point (p<0.02). Conclusion: Inadequate literacy was related to low adherence to treatment, and also to cognitive deficit, low education, smoking and old age. I. II. METHODSCross-sectional study, carried out with hemodialysis patients in clinics in the Midwest, West and Far West of Santa Catarina, which currently serve 481 hemodialysis patients. Inclusion criteria were being on dialysis treatment for at least one month, age over 18Dayani Barbosa dos Santos et al.

Good health literacy leads to better quality of life and medication adherence among hemodialysis patients

“…The result showed that adherence to medication was related to all dimensions of the quality of life except the physical dimension. Health literacy is associated with medication adherence among patients with chronic kidney disease receiving hemodialysis (Barbosa et al, 2021;Fatima et al, 2022;Stømer et al, 2020). A previous study revealed that self-reported low medication adherence was associated with an increased risk for CKD progression (Cedillo-Couvert et al, 2018).…”