OBJECTIVES

Although treatment adherence is essential for realizing the potential benefits of a certain medication-based treatment, non-adherence depicts a major real-life treatment challenge. The Adherence Barriers Questionnaire (ABQ) has been developed to identify barriers to treatment adherence in individual patients and patient groups. It has been used and validated in several indications and languages. However, a Chinese version of the ABQ was missing so far. Therefore, this study aimed to lingually adapt the questionnaire to Chinese.

METHODS

Based on a forward-backward translation process, the ABQ was translated into Chinese. Subsequently, the questionnaire was applied to 142 patients aged ≥35 years who have received anti-hypertensive medication for at least six months. The cross-sectional survey was conducted at the two largest hospitals in Jinghong, China. The Cronbach’s α was used to assess the questionnaire’s reliability. The occurrence of potential barriers in the investigated patient sample was evaluated using descriptive statistics.

RESULTS

All 142 interviewed patients (mean age: 61.8 years, 51.4% female) were able to complete the ABQ. The questionnaire demonstrated a good internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.74).

The majority of patients (61%) reported being affected by more than three different barriers. On average, a patient was affected by 4.3 barriers. The most frequently reported barriers were co-payments (69% of patients), followed by fear of side effects (67%), forgetfulness (56%), and depressive moods (50%). A substantial number of patients believed that medications are poisonous and should be avoided (44%) and would stop their intake if they noticed side effects (39%).

Several barrier-related differences were observed in patient subgroups.

CONCLUSIONS

The ABQ is a suitable tool to detect potential adherence barriers in Chinese patients. A high barrier burden was shown in the sample of hypertension patients in China. Further research, especially regarding the tool’s ability to detect changes over time, is needed.