Tuesday, July 09, 2019

Only 41% Of People Who Were Given Free Preventive Medications Following Their Heart Attacks Were Still Taking Them 1.5 Years Later

You might think that having a heart attack would be motivating when it came to behaviour change, and that taking medications is a very straightforward behaviour.

And yet.

The Post-Myocardial Infarction Free Rx Event and Economic Evaluation (MI FREEE) trial set out to study whether or not cost had a role to play in why so many patients, even post heart attack, don't take the medications prescribed to them in the hopes of preventing another one by freely providing them with those medications.

Results wise, though the group receiving free preventive medications were taking more of them than the group that did not, at the end 1.5 years, only 41% of those receiving all their medications for free, medications prescribed to them after they had an actual heart attack, were taking them.

So file these results under human beings, even when faced with knowledge, and in this case knowledge coupled with a very real glimpse at mortality, struggle to maintain even the easiest of behaviour changes, and consider that in the context of the trope of education and personal responsibility as the sole means to target diet and weight related diseases. If we want to see population level changes, we're going to need to change the food environment.