Why Is It Important That People Take Their Medicines And How Can We Encourage This?

This is a topic which I studied extensively in my master`s project. I am including this in my profile because I think it is a very important area of research and hope that it is convincing in showing that Chemistry can be really interesting.

Patients not taking their medications as prescribed by medical professionals is a big problem. This issue is known as patient compliance. Although the importance of patient`s taking their medication is seemingly self evident, the true magnitude of the issue is often underappreciated. Patients refusing to take prescribed medication as intended can lead to a snowball effect in which a continually worsening condition has to be treated. This treatment plan can involve considerable amounts of time, effort and costs to devise.

Factors that impact compliance include swallowability (how easy it is to swallow a tablet) and dosing frequency. However, the most important factor was recognized to be palatability, which strongly depends on the taste of a medication.

There are many ways to improve the taste of a medicine such as: delivering the medication in a tasteless capsule and the addition of tasty ingredients to the medication such as sugar or mint. An area of research that I looked into was the use of a set of chemicals called "cyclodextrins" to mask taste. Have you heard of a brand called Febreze? Well they actually use cyclodextrins to mask smells. This suggests great potential for the use of cyclodextrins in taste masking of medicines.

I hope you found that interesting and please feel free to message if you have any questions about this topic!