Information, compliance and side‐effects: a study of patients on antidepressant medication.

Abstract

A study was carried out to elucidate whether the improved compliance associated with the provision of verbal and written information about a prescribed drug is due to the specific information or to a non‐specific attention‐placebo effect. 120 depressed outpatients were prescribed dothiepin and randomly allocated to one of three groups: Group A were given verbal and written information about side‐effects; Group B were given verbal and written information about beneficial effects; Group C were told only that the drug was being given to treat their depression and received no written information. Compliance with medication was assessed at 3 weeks and 6 weeks by interrogation and by pill count. At the same time, side‐effects were enquired for and their occurrence or non‐occurrence noted. No significant differences were found between the groups in the rates of compliance at either 3 weeks or 6 weeks. When Groups A and B were combined to give a total ‘information’ group and compared with Group C‐the ‘no‐information’ group‐the rate of compliance at 3 weeks was significantly higher (P less than 0.05) in the ‘information’ group. No significant differences were found between the groups in the rates of reported side‐effects at either 3 weeks or 6 weeks. When Groups A and C were combined and compared with Group B (information about beneficial effects), side‐effects were found to be reported significantly less frequently (P less than 0.05) in the latter at 6 weeks. Of 175 compliance estimates, 97.7% gave concordant results for estimation by interrogation and by pill count.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)