Relationship of Psychological Factors to Failure of Antihypertensive Drug Treatment

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Abstract
Personality traits and pretreatment symptoms of 69 hypertensive patients were documented witn self‐administered questionnaires. Thirteen patients (19%) dropped out during 12 months of treatment. Five of these were lost from follow up and eight failed to tolerate their allotted medication. In this series treatment failure did not seem dependent on the type of drug used, but was linked with a high suspiciousness level and a high pretreatment symptom score. Both measures varied independently of one another and a select group of 10 patients who scored highly on both, had a failure rate of 60%. Our results suggest that hypertensives with an increased predisposition to drug treatment failure can be identified at the pretreatment stage. Recognition of such individuals should assist in their routine clinical management and in the design of antihypertensive drug trials.