The medicative compliance on sodium rabeprazole (RPS) in outpatients and inpatients with peptic ulcer was investigated. Many cases of medicative dropout in patients treated by either proton pump inhibitors or histamine H2receptor antagonist (H2-blockers) have been reported. Therefore, the relationship between the eradicative therapy for Helicobacter pyroli (H. pylori) and the medicative compliance of RPZ were studied. In this study, RPZ was prescribed for 63 outpatients and 30 inpatients. The eradicative therapy for H. pylori for which RPZ, amoxicillin and clarithromycin have been used, were performed for 42 cases and 20 cases of outpatients and inpatients, respectively.
In retrospective surveys on their medicative process, throughout the therapy only 3 outpatients (5%) were recognized as the non-compliant cases. Although, while observing the progress after the periods of RPZ medication, 6 outpatients (10%) and 7 inpatients (23%) were non-compliant for the directions given by the physicians. The rate for inpatients was thus more than twice the rate fore outpatients. These non-compliant cases showed no significant difference regarding age or the days of RPZ prescription between both groups of the patients. Regarding the results of peroral endoscopy in forty-five inpatients, all the cases were diagnosed to be in active stages based on the initial endoscopic examinations, the length of RPZ medications was thus 8 days in the active stage for 20 cases, 15 days in the healing stage of 11 cases, and 26 days in the scar stage of 14 cases and the differences were significant (p< 0.01 and P< 0.05) between the medication periods in the active, healing and scar stages, respectively.
These results suggested that medicative compliance is one of the important factors in the pharmaceutical care of patients with peptic ulcer. Furthermore, good compliance based on informed consent is thus considered to be an important factor for improving the effects of eradicative therapy for H. pylori.
