The Use of Pill Counts as a Facilitator of Adherence with Antiretroviral Therapy in Resource Limited Settings

Loice Achieng, Helen Musangi, Katherine Billingsley, Sharon Onguit, Edwin Ombegoh, LeeAnn Bryant, Jonathan Mwiindi, Nathaniel Smith and Philip Keiser

PLOS ONE, 2013, vol. 8, issue 12, 1-

Abstract: Background: Pill counts are often used to measure adherence to ART, but there is little data on how they affect adherence. We previously showed a bivariate relationship between clinicians counting pills and adherence in patients receiving HIV care in Kenya. We present a secondary analysis of the relationship between numbers of pill counts and clinical outcomes in resource limited settings Methods: Patients initiating ART at Kijabe Hospital were monitored for the number of discretionary pill counts performed by their clinician in the first 6 months of ART. Subjects were followed for at least 1 year after enrollment. The number of clinician pill counts was correlated to ART adherence. The primary endpoints were time to treatment failure, defined as a detectable HIV-1 viral load, death; or loss to follow-up. Results: Clinician pill counts were done at 68% of clinic visits for 304 subjects. There was a positive correlation between the number of clinician pill counts and ART adherence (r = 0.21, p

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0067259 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 67259&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0067259

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0067259

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().