Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Therapeutic Continuity among Outpatients with Chronic Cardiovascular Therapies.
Int J Environ Res Public Health
; 19(19)2022 Sep 24.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-2043742
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic poses major challenges to healthcare systems. We aimed to investigate the impact of the pandemic on prescription and adherence patterns of chronic cardiovascular therapies (lipid-lowering [LL], oral antidiabetic drugs [AD], and antihypertensives [AH]) using administrative pharmaceutical databases. For each treatment, two cohorts of prevalent cases in 2019 and 2020 were compared. We evaluated the percentage change in dispensed packages and treatment adherence as a proportion of days covered (PDC). For all therapies, an increase was observed during March-April 2020 (LL +4.52%; AD +2.72%; AH +1.09%), with a sharp decrease in May-June 2020 (LL -8.40%; AD -12.09%; AH -10.54%) compared to 2019. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on chronic cardiovascular treatments appears negligible on adherence 533,414 patients showed high adherence to LL (PDC ≥ 80%) in January-February 2020, and 2.29% became poorly adherent (PDC < 20%) in the following four-month period (vs. 1.98% in 2019). A similar increase was also observed for AH (1.25% with poor adherence in 2020 vs. 0.93% in 2019). For AD, the increase was restrained (1.55% with poor adherence in 2020 vs. 1.37% in 2019). The rush to supply drugs at the beginning of lockdown preserved the continuity of chronic cardiovascular therapies.
Keywords
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
COVID-19
/
Antihypertensive Agents
Type of study:
Cohort study
/
Experimental Studies
/
Observational study
/
Prognostic study
Limits:
Humans
Language:
English
Year:
2022
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Ijerph191912101
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