Compliance and hypertension.

Despite decades of attention to noncompliance to treatment for hypertension, the problem remains a significant factor in the inadequate control of blood pressure. Current approaches to enhancing compliance use patient demographics, medication characteristics, clinical factors, health beliefs, and the quality of patient-provider communication. Clinical researchers are just beginning to apply a new approach that views compliance as a behavior change taking place over time. In this view, patients do not simply change their behavior through a one-time decision to take their medication as directed by their physicians; they move through five stages of behavior change. Clinicians can increase compliance by assessing their patients to determine the patient's stage of behavior change, then matching their interventions to that stage.