Do people with cancer comply with oral chemotherapy treatments?

Many people with cancer have oral medication as part or all of their regime. This medication is primarily self administered in the community. This mini-review aimed to determine the level of compliance of adult cancer patients with oral chemotherapy and to assess the quality of the available evidence. Searches were undertaken using three electronic databases (Medline, Embase, CINAHL) for studies which evaluated the compliance of adult cancer patients with oral anti-neoplastic agents through self-report, pill counts, drug/metabolite levels or microelectronic monitoring system (MEMS). Articles were selected if the follow-up was higher than 80% of patients. Six papers were identified for the review. The methodological quality of the studies was poor. The sample size of the majority of them was small and the method used to measure adherence was not entirely reliable. The results of these papers were varied and contradictory. A firm conclusion cannot be drawn because the studies present significant methodological flaws. The comparison of results between studies is difficult due to the lack of a gold-standard measure of adherence and a standardised definition of non-compliance. Further research in this area is needed. However it does appear that compliance is a problem in this patient group.