From Morisky to Hill-bone; self-reports scales for measuring adherence to medication.

There are a number of approaches to studying medication-taking behavior. Self-report measures have the benefits of being cheap, easy to administer, non-intrusive, and able to provide information on attitudes and beliefs about medication. Potential limitations to self-report are that the ability to understand the items, and willingness to disclose information, can affect response accuracy and, thus, questionnaire validity. A computerized systematic search of the PubMed databases identified articles on scales for medication adherence measuring using the MeSH terms medication adherence, compliance, and persistence combined with the terms questionnaire self-report. Adherence scales have identified mostly in the last few years (2005-2012). One of the main sources has been article (Lavsa et. al) which evaluated literature describing medication adherence surveys/scales to gauge patient behaviors at the point of care. Articles were included if they evaluated or reviewed self-reported adherence medication scale applicable to chronic diseases and with a good coefficient of internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's alpha (alpha)). Articles that contained data about self-report medication adherence scales use were included. A total of about one hundred articles were identified. Of those articles, 20% (20 of 100) were included in the review because of their relevance to the article topic. This article describes various self-report scales by which to monitor medication adherence, their advantages and disadvantages, and discusses the effectiveness of their application at different chronic diseases. There are many self-report scales for measuring medication adherence and their derivatives (or subscales). Due to the different nature of the diseases, there is no gold-standard scale for measuring medication adherence. It can be nevertheless concluded that the nearest to gold-standard is the Medication Adherence Questionnaire (MAQ) scale by Morisky et.al. but we found better internal consistency reliability in some other scales.