According to a retrospective observational study, primary medication nonadherence is frequently observed, particularly in cases of asymptomatic conditions. Researchers aimed to examine primary medication nonadherence in various prescription indications and identify factors that predict drug nonadherence among adults in a primary care population.

The major outcome of the study was to determine the occurrence of primary medication nonadherence based on drug class. To assess the relationship between patient demographic, clinical, or provider traits with primary medication nonadherence, multivariable logistic regression models were employed. Utilizing C statistic, discriminative performance of the models was assessed.

The study analyzed a total of 91,660 unique prescriptions from a cohort of over 200,000 volunteers. Primary medication nonadherence varied across different drug classes, ranging from 13.7% for antidepressants to 30.3% for antihypertensives. In conditions that usually manifest with symptoms (such as anxiety or infections), nonadherence rates ranged from 13.7% to 17.5%.

For medications related to those detected through screening or asymptomatic conditions (such as hypertension, osteoporosis, and diabetes), nonadherence rates ranged from 30.0% to 21.2%. Lipid-lowering agents had a relatively low nonadherence rate at 15% The models assessing the relationship between patient demographic, clinical, or provider traits and primary medication nonadherence showed limited discriminative performance.

To sum up, the prevalence of primary medication nonadherence is notable, especially in asymptomatic conditions. The limited reliability of the models indicates that when utilizing characteristic-based interventions or prediction tools to enhance primary medication nonadherence, caution is required.