Chest
Original ResearchDepressive Symptoms and Adherence to Asthma Therapy After Hospital Discharge
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
This study was approved by the Johns Hopkins Internal Review Board. Data were collected as part of a prospective cohort study conducted from April 2001 through October 2002, which has been previously described.3 Participants were men and women ≥ 18 years old who had been admitted to an inner-city hospital with a physician diagnosis of asthma exacerbation. Participants did not have other respiratory disorders or contraindications to inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) and/or oral corticosteroids (OCS).
Participants
Of 111 eligible patients, 82 patients (74%) agreed to participate in the study. Fifty-nine patients (72%) completed the 2-week follow-up visit and had complete data on adherence to ICS and OCS (hereby referred to as “participants”). As compared with participants, patients without adherence data were younger (43.2 ± 10.9 years vs 35.8 ± 9.3 years, p = 0.005), but they did not differ on the other measured sociodemographic or asthma-related characteristics. Participants were most often unmarried
Discussion
The main findings of this study are as follows: (1) high levels of depressive symptoms are common (ie, 41%) in inner-city patients hospitalized with asthma exacerbations, and (2) the presence of a high level of depressive symptoms is associated with an increased risk of poor adherence to asthma therapy after discharge home. Compared to patients with low levels of depressive symptoms, those with high levels of depressive symptoms had more than five times the odds of using less than half of their
Conclusions
Our results suggest that depressive symptoms are common among minority adults hospitalized for asthma and serve as an important predictor of poor adherence to asthma therapy after discharge home. Our findings add to a growing body of evidence across several chronic health conditions and suggest that screening and treating depression, and providing additional forms of psychosocial support may improve the health outcomes of asthma patients, both in terms of symptom remission and of improved
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Cited by (0)
This work was performed at Johns Hopkins University.
Financial support was provided by a Parker B. Francis Fellowship Award, National Institutes of Health (HL67850 and AR02160).
The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Reproduction of this article is prohibited without written permission from the American College of Chest Physicians (www.chestjournal.org/misc/reprints.shtml).