ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The Medication Adherence Rating Scale (MARS) is a 10-item self-report measure of medication adherence in psychosis which is a vital predictor of illness course and outcome in patient with schizophrenia. The initial and subsequent studies have shown that MARS has good reliability and validity scores after correction for the small sample size in the index study. AIM: This study aimed to determine the psychometric properties of MARS among outpatients with schizophrenia at the outpatient clinic of the Neuropsychiatric Hospital Aro Abeokuta Ogun State Nigeria. METHODS: Intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was used to determine the internal consistency, item-total correlations, and reliability of the instrument. Factor analysis was done using principal component analysis with varimax rotation. RESULTS: The intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) for these 10 items (at time T1) was 0.6 with a P value of <0.001 while for the test--retest analysis was 0.7 with a P value of 0.04. A principal components factor analysis with varimax rotation produced a four-factor solution and factor 4 was found to be the most internally consistent, with Cronbach's alpha of 0.63. CONCLUSION: This study supports the internal consistency, test--retest reliability, and constructs validity of the MARS.
Subject(s)
Medication Adherence/psychology , Medication Adherence/statistics & numerical data , Psychometrics/instrumentation , Schizophrenia/drug therapy , Surveys and Questionnaires/standards , Adult , Factor Analysis, Statistical , Female , Humans , Male , Middle Aged , Nigeria , Outpatients , Psychotic Disorders , Reproducibility of Results , Schizophrenia/diagnosis , Self ReportABSTRACT
WHAT IS KNOWN AND OBJECTIVE: Based on in vitro assays and select animal models, buprenorphine is commonly called a 'partial agonist'. An implication is that it should produce less analgesic effect in humans than so-called 'full agonists' such as morphine or fentanyl. However, buprenorphine has a multimechanistic pharmacology, and thus partial agonism at a specific receptor is not particularly relevant to its overall analgesic action. We review published clinical trials that directly compared the magnitude of buprenorphine's analgesic effect to analgesics commonly considered full agonists. COMMENT: Due to different signal transduction pathways, a drug can be a full agonist on one endpoint and a partial agonist on another. Therefore, we limited the present review to buprenorphine's analgesic effect. WHAT IS NEW AND CONCLUSION: Twenty-four controlled clinical trials were identified, plus a case report and dose-response curve. Based on complete or comparable pain relief, in buprenorphine had full clinical analgesic efficacy in 25 of the 26 studies.
