Long-term adherence to antiretroviral therapy in resource-limited settings: a bitter pill to swallow.

Adherence to antiretroviral therapy is an important predictor of long-term treatment success. Adherence can be differentiated between early adherence challenges, that are about integrating pill-taking into daily life, and long-term adherence, where patients struggle to maintain clinical connections and interrupt clinical care and medication use. In resource-limited settings, treatment interruptions may be more useful predictors of patient outcome than pill-taking alone. Interventions that are aimed at providing support to patients and their individual challenges to prevent interruptions in treatment and care may have a greater impact over time on clinically important outcomes than interventions targeted only at pill-taking behaviours.