Nearly 6 in 10 Patients With Bipolar Disorder Do Not Fill All of Their Prescriptions

A majority of patients who are prescribed medications for bipolar disorder do not fill their prescriptions as often as they receive them, astudy in theJournal of Affective Disorders has found.Jonne Lintunen, M.D., Ph.D., of Niuvanniemi Hospital in Kuopio, Finland, and colleagues studied data from Finnish health and prescription registries for 33,131 adults who have bipolar disorder. The patients were diagnosed with bipolar disorder between 1987 and 2018, and the researchers followed dispensing rates of electronic prescriptions from 2015 to 2018. Among all patients, 61.8% had at least one prescription for a mood stabilizer, and 88.6% had at least one prescription for an antipsychotic medication.Over the four-year follow-up, 59.1% of patients did not fill at least one of their prescriptions for a mood stabilizer or antipsychotic medication. Furthermore, 31% of patients did not fill their prescriptions for a mood stabilizer or antipsychotic medication at least 20% of the time. Among mood stabilizers, lithium had the lowest proportion of nondispensed medications, 11.3%, and valproic acid had the highest, 14.8%. Among antipsychotics that had at least 1,000 prescriptions, clozapine had the lowest proportion of nondispensed prescriptions, 9.0%, and asenapine had the highest, 31.4%. Paliperidone and haloperidol also had high proportions of nondispensed prescriptions, 24.3% and 23.2%, respectively.Lintunen and colleagues offered a possible explanation for why patients might be more li...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: antipsychotics bipolar disorder clozapine Journal of Affective Disorders lithium mood stabilizers nonadherence prescriptions Source Type: research