Objectives: To validate six indirect methods for evaluation of therapy compliance with oral hypoglycemic agents: self-reported compliance, attendance to scheduled visits, Morisky-Green test, degree of disease control, medical judgement and level of knowledge on the disease.
Patients and methods: The certainty method used was pill counts at patient's home by surprise with a sample of 107 randomly selected patients from three Primary Care Centers in the province of Alicante.
Results: SV was the method with the highest specificity (94.2%), likelihood of low compliance (84.2%) and percentage of likelihood of low compliance (5.1). DC assessed by basal blood glucose had the highest sensitivity (81.8%) and DC assessed by glycoxylated hemoglobin the highest likelihood of high compliance (61.1%).
Conclusions: In this study, SV and DC with basal blood glucose were the highest validity indicators and could be used combined in clinical practice to evaluate compliance with oral hypoglycemic agents.