Some Patients Stop Taking Their Drugs After a Stroke
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
By: Todd Neale

Medpagetoday.com

About a quarter of patients (24.5%) discharged following a stroke stopped taking at least one of their prescribed medications within three months, researchers found.

Although having three-quarters of patients remaining adherent to their treatment is "fair," the hospitals in the study were committed to provide the best stroke care, according to Cheryl Bushnell, MD, of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., and colleagues.

"This may be the 'best-case scenario,'" they wrote online in Archives of Neurology.

The authors noted that there are an estimated 180,000 recurrent strokes each year in the United States, and that previous studies have shown that in patients with coronary heart disease, nonpersistence with secondary prevention therapies was associated with a 2-fold increase in cardiovascular disease events, including stroke.

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