Stumbling Blocks for Patient Compliance in Parkinson’s Disease Treatment

May 25, 2011 - PRLog -- Pharma IQ: What are the unique challenges in patient adherence and compliance for patients with Parkinson’s disease, compared to other neurological illnesses and chronic disease areas?

N Favre: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common progressive neurodegenerative disease, after Alzheimer’s disease (AD). It affects more than 6 million people worldwide. It has the particularity, like AD, to be an age related disease, meaning that the older you get the higher a probability you have to be affected by PD.

The most well known and probably still the most efficient treatment, for PD is levodopa. The problem with this treatment is that it requires some titration and is often a multi-dose per day treatment, which is a real burden for patient adherence. It is also established, that in the late stages of PD, severe cognitive symptoms can appear and therefore lessen the ability to take a treatment correctly.

Moreover, an old patient population is also suffering from other diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis and others, which is adding the intake of pills per day and therefore complicates further the global adherence picture. Finally, treatments like levodopa, or more recently dopamine-agonists are drugs associated with severe side-effects and some patients might become reluctant to a multi-dose or high dose treatment and instead start their own dosing regimen.

Pharma IQ: What do you feel is the best strategy for success in increasing adherence in patients with PD? What combination of pharmacological and non-pharmacological approaches works best?

To access the interview transcript and mp3 in full please click here: http://www.patientcomplianceevent.com/Event.aspx?id=49118...




Nicolas Favre will be delivering a presentation at the Patient Compliance Conference 2011, due to take place from 19th-21st September in Amsterdam. For further information please visit www.patientcomplianceevent.com, contact us on 0800 652 2363 or email enquire@iqpc.co.uk