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Rheumatoid arthritis
Multilevel factors predict medication adherence in rheumatoid arthritis: a 6-month cohort study
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  • Published on: 3 March 2022
    Correspondence on “Multilevel factors predict medication adherence in rheumatoid arthritis: a 6-month cohort study” by Balsa et al.
    • Lung-Fa Pan, Professor 1, Graduate Institute of Radiological Science, Central Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Takun, Taichung, Taiwan.
    • Other Contributors:
      • Tsung-Kun Lin, Professor
      • Gwo-Ping Jong, Professor

    We read with great interest the recent publication by Balsa et al.,[1] which reported that patient–physician agreement on the treatment, the type of treatment prescribed (favoring second-line conventional disease-modifying rheumatic drugs and biological disease-modifying rheumatic drugs/targeted synthetic disease-modifying rheumatic drugs), and the patient feeling privileged by the medication received are effective predictors of medication adherence in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). In contrast, sociodemographic or clinical factors were not associated with medication adherence. This study focuses on medication adherence as a significant clinical variable and is a valuable addition to the literature. However, some issues have not been addressed by the authors.
    First, epidemiologists agree that studies assessing a relation at one moment in time are called cross-sectional studies.[2] If the follow-up time is considered, the study is longitudinal, and it is either a cohort or a case-control study. A cohort or a case-control study must be applied to variables that can be reasonably assumed stable over time. However, this study was a six-month multicentre observational longitudinal prospective study, and medication adherence is related to psychological, communicational, and logistic factors measured at the same time. Therefore, this study is better labeled a cross-sectional study, since psychological, communicational, and logistic factors cannot be assumed to be...

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    Conflict of Interest:
    None declared.