Polypharmacy in HIV/AIDS patients, antiretroviral therapy and factors affecting therapy compliance

Compliance with antiretroviral therapy is the most important criterion in the treatment of HIV infection. Multiple factors play role on treatment compliance such as comforting diseases, mood disorders, smoking, alcohol and drug use. The comorbidities of the patients with increasing age and the resulting polypharmacy are also moving towards treatment compliance. This thesis consists of investigating the factors affecting the treatment compliance of the patients and revealing what can be done for increasing the treatment compliance. After the approval of the Ethic commitee with 2021/235 protocol number and the approval of the Turkish Medicines and Medical Devices Agency with E-66175679-514.05.01-548661 number, 114 outpatient with HIV/AIDS diagnosis that applied to clinic between August 2021 and August 2022 were included. Sociodemographic data of the patients, Beck Depression Scale and CASE Concordance Index data were recorded. 64% of the patients were male and 36% were female. The mean age of the patients was 44.22 ± 13.93. It was observed that 44.7% of the patients, regardless of age, had comorbidities. While no more than 2 comorbidities were observed in the patients between the ages of 18-34, this rate was found to be 12.8% between the ages of 35-49, and the comorbidity status of patients aged 50 and over was 50%. Polypharmacy was found in 42.5% of patients aged 50 years and older. A single tablet antiretroviral treatment regimen usage was found in 78.9% of the patients. 69.3% of the patients were compliant with the treatment according to the CASE Compliance Index. While the patients' sexual orientation, mood, additional disease, taking antibiotics prophylaxis for a HIV-related disease and polypharmacy affected their compliance, gender, marital status, occupation status, education level, route of transmission, smoking, alcohol and drug use had no effect on the patient's the treatment compliance. As a result, drug compliance in the treatment of HIV infection is very important. In our study, although detecting some unchangeable factors that affecting treatment compliance, it has been concluded that treatment compliance can be increased with the arrangements to be made for changeable factors. Keywords: HIV, polypharmacy, treatment compliance